The closing details in the life and times of Bill Mazeroski include a prayer service for baseball\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
A trans-century coincidence, obviously, but let\u2019s just pretend it isn\u2019t, 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\u2019ve internalized about his iconography \u2013 remembered, misremembered, and everything in between \u2013 about October, about baseball, about life, and even, ultimately, what Pittsburgh thought about itself.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cControlling the rivers, restoring downtown \u2013 Point State Park was the Irish\/Galway section of town where David Lawrence had grown up \u2013 it was a mess,\u201d the esteemed University of Pittsburgh historian Rob Ruck was telling me this week. \u201cAnd 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\u2019s length, holding onto steel and heavy metal.<\/p>\n
\u201cPittsburgh had won nothing in decades, in white sport, but to Lawrence and Rooney and all those people, winning at sport was everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maz\u2019s homer to end Game 7, Ruck posits, was Pittsburgh\u2019s psychological affirmation.<\/p>\n
As you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d never roamed within 200 miles of Pittsburgh. But it can\u2019t 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\u2019t that long of a walk. Had the nuns detained me over some transgression?<\/p>\n
Many among the mourners Monday will sort through the memories again, but the ones that aren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
The prayer service, for example, will have something else in common with Game 7 aside from the start time. Nobody will strike out.<\/p>\n
You heard me.<\/p>\n
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 \u2018em.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s exact pitching line: 5 innings, 4 hits, 3 runs, 3 earned runs, 1 walk, 0 strikeouts.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t been set up yet. Well, Shantz is only 100. There\u2019s no hurry.<\/p>\n
But we\u2019ve come to learn, as Game 7 goes deeper and deeper into memory\u2019s mist, that we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook at the people,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes you forget when you\u2019re in sports, where everyone has a prejudice toward sports and how important things are to sports, that you can\u2019t just look at that,\u201d Leyland said this week on the phone from Florida. \u201cLook at the impact it had on people\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
What everyone should remember about Maz, without an ounce of embarrassment over what they can\u2019t, don\u2019t, 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was as decent a person as I\u2019ve ever met,\u201d said former teammate Steve Blass. \u201cHe 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, \u2018I don\u2019t want to be here, but you know, you are getting your ass kicked right now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Yeah. Aren\u2019t we all?<\/p>\n
————<\/p>\n
This story has been updated to reflect that Bob Skinner is also a remaining living member of the 1960 World Series team.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2026 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Visit www.post-gazette.com<\/a>. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.<\/a><\/p>\n \n Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.\n <\/p>\n \n Error! There was an error processing your request.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The closing details in the life and times of Bill Mazeroski include a prayer service for baseball\u2019s archetype…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[4662,31296,59345,73,75,74,726],"class_list":["post-127276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-baseball","tag-mlb-baseball","tag-mlb-world-series","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}