The minimum salary for a major league baseball player today is more than half a million dollars. Most players make a lot more than that — some in the tens of millions a year.
But there was a time when ball players earned salaries measured in the tens of thousands, not millions. When they played on grass and traveled by train.
It was during that era that a young radio sportscaster broke into the business. His name was Curt Gowdy, and over the coming decades he became one of America’s best known sports broadcasters.
I met him in 1993, the year he wrote a book about what he called “the innocent days of sport.” But he conceded, the years 1945 to 1960 were probably kinder to the team owners and executives than the players.