The closing details in the life and times of Bill Mazeroski include a prayer service for baseball’s archetype second baseman at 1 p.m. Monday at St. Maria Goretti Church in distant Hatfield, Pa., the same start time as Game 7 of the 1960 World Series.

A trans-century coincidence, obviously, but let’s just pretend it isn’t, because everything in his wondrous life carried the tintinnabulation of destiny, and no one in the lives of older baseball fans around here did more for our enduring memories than he. Until last weekend, the humble Hall of Famer had spent most of his 89 years as a walking, breathing monument to everything we’ve internalized about his iconography – remembered, misremembered, and everything in between – about October, about baseball, about life, and even, ultimately, what Pittsburgh thought about itself.

David L. Lawrence, the former Pittsburgh mayor and Pennsylvania governor, long ago identified William Stanley Mazeroski, the unassuming son of an Ohio coal miner, as the civic cement of the Pittsburgh Renaissance.

“Controlling the rivers, restoring downtown – Point State Park was the Irish/Galway section of town where David Lawrence had grown up – it was a mess,” the esteemed University of Pittsburgh historian Rob Ruck was telling me this week. “And you had the railroads, the smoke abatement issue, all of these things that were an incredible example of Pittsburgh making the transition, after keeping that transition at arm’s length, holding onto steel and heavy metal.

“Pittsburgh had won nothing in decades, in white sport, but to Lawrence and Rooney and all those people, winning at sport was everything.”

Maz’s homer to end Game 7, Ruck posits, was Pittsburgh’s psychological affirmation.

As you’re likely aware, affirmation arrived riding a 1-0 pitch from New York Yankees right-hander Ralph Terry on a Thursday afternoon, and was immediately re-routed into Schenley Park, but now the man who made that moment a cornerstone of a million memories is himself a memory, and for many of a certain age that will be a difficult transition as well.

The people who were alive on Oct. 13, 1960, have Maz memories as diverse as their fingerprints, not all complete or even correct, but still at their fingertips most of a century later.

I remember coming home from school as a 7-year-old and my mother telling me the Pirates had done it, beaten the Yankees in the World Series, and there was real happiness on her face, incredulity even. And she’d never roamed within 200 miles of Pittsburgh. But it can’t be right. Why would I be getting home so late, well after 3:36 EDT, the moment Yogi Berra realized he was not catching that thing. It wasn’t that long of a walk. Had the nuns detained me over some transgression?

Many among the mourners Monday will sort through the memories again, but the ones that aren’t personal or unique to the semi-ancient narrative will pale next to everything that actually happened in that singular baseball game at Forbes Field. Like a carefully stored jewel, its intricate facets reflect new light at every extraction.

The prayer service, for example, will have something else in common with Game 7 aside from the start time. Nobody will strike out.

You heard me.

No one struck out in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, when 19 runs were scored by 22 batters going to the plate 76 times to face nine pitchers. No one. Remember that when baseball returns this month and the typical game has more than 16 of ‘em.

Some of the factoids you can pull from that box score are as staggering today as when they first hit the pages of the Post-Gazette more than 65 years ago. The two pitchers who survived the longest that day, Vernon Law of the Pirates and Bobby Shantz of the Yankees, are now calcified in club history. Law is the only remaining Pirates pitcher from that championship team, and Shantz, who was traded to the Pirates two months later, is the oldest living Pirate. In Game 7, they would somehow duplicate each other’s exact pitching line: 5 innings, 4 hits, 3 runs, 3 earned runs, 1 walk, 0 strikeouts.

With no earthly idea what to do with that, I phoned Shantz this week. Twice. Both times, a nice lady said the person I was trying to reach has a voice mail box that hasn’t been set up yet. Well, Shantz is only 100. There’s no hurry.

But we’ve come to learn, as Game 7 goes deeper and deeper into memory’s mist, that we’re looking at the wrong thing anyway. When I started remembering again this week, something Hall of Fame manager Jim Leyland once said about it came immediately to the surface.

“Look at the people,” he said of his memory of the moment, as if to say not at the hit itself, but the way it hits the people looking at it.

“Sometimes you forget when you’re in sports, where everyone has a prejudice toward sports and how important things are to sports, that you can’t just look at that,” Leyland said this week on the phone from Florida. “Look at the impact it had on people’s lives. For as long as they live. Now with Maz gone, it has a different kind of feel to it, but you know it not only impacted Pittsburgh but it impacted baseball all over, and it always will.”

What everyone should remember about Maz, without an ounce of embarrassment over what they can’t, don’t, or misremember, is that the guy who hit the most famous home run in the history of the national pastime was then and for the rest of his days the least pretentious hero you could ever encounter.

“He was as decent a person as I’ve ever met,” said former teammate Steve Blass. “He never wanted to talk to anyone at another position about how to go about their business; he never wanted to go and talk to the pitcher. I remember getting my face torn off one day and the dugout signaled to him to go and talk to me while they got somebody else warmed up. He comes to the mound, with this always-introverted walk, and he says, ‘I don’t want to be here, but you know, you are getting your ass kicked right now.’”

Yeah. Aren’t we all?

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This story has been updated to reflect that Bob Skinner is also a remaining living member of the 1960 World Series team.

© 2026 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Visit www.post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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