Baseball
- January 23 – Willie Mays receives 409 of 432 votes in the BBWAA election to earn enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.
- August 2 – death of Thurman Munson, New York Yankees catcher, in an air crash
- World Series – Pittsburgh Pirates won 4 games to 3 over the Baltimore Orioles. The Series MVP was Willie Stargell, Pittsburgh. The Pirates become the only team in sports history to come back from a three games to one deficit in a championship series twice, having also achieved the comeback in the 1925 World Series.
Read more about this topic: 1979 In Sports
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)
“How, in one short century, has this ersatz sport so strangled the consciousness of the country in the grip of its flabby tentacles that the mention of women’s baseball gets no reaction other than blank amazement?”
—Darlene Mehrer, As quoted in Women in Baseball. Ch. 6, by Gai Ingham Berlage (1994)
“It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)