My memory may be faulty, but I think 1978 may have been my favorite season as a kid. I was the right age to understand everything going on in baseball (age 12), the Dodgers had finally solidified their suppression of the Big Red Machine, and the Kansas City Royals were actually a good team. This latter fact was important, because in Jacksonville, Florida, the AA Jacksonville Suns were a Royals affiliate.
It was also the peak of my baseball card collecting, an important activity in 1978. If you didn't have a local MLB team, you saw baseball twice a week, at best: the Saturday Game of the Week on NBC, and the occasional Monday Night Baseball. Those games normally featured the Yankees, Red Sox, Reds and Dodgers, but in 1978 you got some Phillies, Pirates and Royals games too.
But that's only 7 teams. If you wanted to know what a player on one of the other teams looked like, you pretty much had to look at baseball cards. At that time, cards were not valuable and we had no inkling they would be some day. We just used them as our only access to what players and teams looked like.
I'm feeling old, because that was 30 years ago. I thought it might be fun to look back at the box scores, day-by-day, and see what the season might look like in hindsight. At 12 and without much television, I don't have many memories of specific plays or games, so it's almost like I'll be looking at the games cold.
