Baseball the Year You Were Born-1966

1966 was known as the year "the world went mad", what with the murder of eight nurses in Chicago by Richard Speck and Charles Whitman's sniper killings of innocents from a tower on the University of Texas campus. The year 1966 in baseball saw a Triple Crown winner in the American League, a close pennant race in the National League, and a display of pitching in the World Series that was simply phenomenal. 1966 in Major League Baseball yielded a pitching Triple Crown in the senior circuit, the last season of one of the game's immortals.

Baltimore got one hundred RBI campaigns from Boog Powell, Brooks Robinson, and Frank Robinson to handily win the American League flag in 1966. Frank also hit a league-leading .316 and had the most homers at 49 to go with the most runs batted in, 122. This gave Robinson the Triple Crown, a feat that Carl Yastrzemski duplicated the very next season, but one that hasn't been accomplished since. Robinson's heroics catapulted the Birds to a four game lead over the Tigers by the end of June, and they wound up nine on top of the Twins by the time October rolled around. Robinson led the American League in a dozen offensive categories, becoming the only man to win the MVP Award in both leagues, as he had taken the honor in 1961 with the Reds.

Baltimore had a great bullpen to go with their young starting pitchers, one of whom would go on to great things- Jim Palmer. Palmer was just twenty in 1966, and he was 15-10 with six complete games. 23 year old Dave McNally, who would win twenty contests four straight years with the Orioles, was on this team, as was an overlooked pitcher nowadays, Wally Bunker. By the time he was 22 years old, Wally had gone 39-19 for Baltimore, but arm trouble would force the right-hander out of the game by 1971, a terrible shame with the potential he had.