Endangered Species

If you accept that the world of sports is a living, evolving organism, like the amoeba or the Dallas Mavericks, then you should not fear change but embrace it. Charles (No Relation to Danny) Darwin was right about the survival of the fittest. The laws of nature suggest that something must die—the test-pattern plaid sports jackets favored by college basketball coaches in the 1970s, the Battle of the Network Stars—for a species to continue to thrive, and from the compost heap of things that once seemed like a good idea emerge vibrant, more highly evolved matter such as an NHL franchise in North Carolina, Olympic beach volleyball and scoreboard dot races.

Save the wails. Many items on SI's endangered-species list—wooden woods, for example—soon will be as dead as the dodo, but we will shed no more tears for proud persimmon than we did for the slide rule. How good could the good old days have been if little more than 50 years ago not only were all the tennis balls white but also all the major league baseball players?

That said, many of the endangered species on the following pages strike us as worth preserving, from good ol' boy football coaches to Fenway Park to basketball shorts that stop at mid-thigh. We are even pulling for the survival of that once-sacred but now scorned big league institution, the doubleheader. Today Ernie Banks would be saying, "It's a beautiful day for baseball. Let's play one."

Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.

LOST ARTS

Drag Bunting

Skilled practitioners of this art have dwindled to just a few: the Los Angeles Dodgers' Brett Butler and Otis Nixon, the Seattle Mariners' Joey Cora, the St. Louis Cardinals' Delino DeShields and the Atlanta Braves' Kenny Lofton. The hard-carpeted infields in many stadiums have made any kind of bunting risky, but to carry the ball past the pitcher's mound with just the right amount of oomph is almost too delicate an act for anyone playing in the age of smash-ball.

"Everyone wants to see how far he can hit the ball," says Cora. "Guys who bunt are considered sissies." Major league sluggers, take note: One such sissy was New York Yankees great Mickey Mantle, who in between his many skillfully laid-down drag bunts hit 536 home runs.

Umpire Baiting
When was the last time you heard someone yell "Kill the ump!"? In the age of political correctness, fans have decided that umpires deserve to live. Why, paying customers rarely even offer their glasses to the arbiters. Apparently, "You suck!" is deemed sufficiently insulting. "You hear little kids say that, with their parents sitting right beside them." marvels American League umpire Dan Morrison. The quality of ump baiting has declined steeply since a mere decade ago, when National League ump Larry Poncino, then working the Pacific Coast League, heard a fan cry, "Your mother swims out to meet battleships!"

Underhand Free Throws