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Wow! the way this is written I almost feel like the major leaguers deserve their astronomical salaries! But I can't believe without press approbrium, one play could have such a long standing impact on a man's life...This is like the Thrill of Victory and agony of defeat ABC trailer from decades ago watching some unfortunate skier karom off a jump at the Olympics every Sunday on Wide World of Sports...
I've often wondered if the poor subject had blocked that channel from his TV or received so many royalties from the replays that he laughed all the way to the bank...Buckner
doesn't sound like he got any compensation for his momentary lapse, being reverbrated through the media for generations...What about all the other plays and pitches in the game? I agree with the author...Let the guy alone!!! SHEESH!!! Thanks BD!

I've often wondered if the poor subject had blocked that channel from his TV or received so many royalties from the replays that he laughed all the way to the bank...Buckner doesn't sound like he got any compensation for his momentary lapse, being reverbrated through the media for generations...What about all the other plays and pitches in the game? I agree with the author...Let the guy alone!!! SHEESH!!! Thanks BD!

To my knowledge, Bill Buckner only once tried a cash-in on his infamous hour: when Michael Jordan was making his attempt to play pro baseball, Nike arranged a round of television spots featuring Willie Mays, Spike Lee, Stan Musial, Jordan, and Buckner. In the spot, Jordan at one point tries and fails to field a grounder. Says Lee: "He's no Bill Buckner." Answers Buckner: "But he's trying." The spots never saw the light of say, though Buckner was paid handsomely enough for his work, because Jordan decided shortly after filming them to return to the NBA with the Chicago Bulls. After that, he returned to his out-of-spotlight life, until he finally agreed to sit for an ESPN Classic Sports Century installment on the infamous play.

But I can't believe without press approbrium, one play could have such a long standing impact on a man's life...

You don't know Red Sox Nation. Especially on the home turf in New England. Granted that Boston has had, historically, a particularly carnivorous sports press which some believe even more so than New York's or Philadelphia's can be (Ted Williams could tell you only too much about the cannibals in the Boston sports press in his day...), but in too many ways you could make a case that in Boston, as also in Philadelphia, you could have a completely press-less town and Bill Buckner would still have been turned overnight into Beelzebub incarnate for his mistake.

Believe it or not, though, there was a World Series goat, not of Boston, who received almost comparable treatment to Buckner that could have been so without his city's sportswriters: Ernie Lombardi, the huge, powerfully-built, tank of a catcher for the Cincinnati Reds, was made the goat of a 1939 World Series that was a complete mismatch - the Reds, winning their first pennant in exactly twenty years, were all but annihilated by a very powerful club of Yankees, but the play that received the most opprobrium was Yankee outfielder Charlie (King Kong) Keller plowing into Lombardi on a play at the plate which knocked Lombardi out cold. It was the presumed unlikelihood of that kind of knockout - Lombardi was, by standards of his era, a huge and powerful man - that heaped the abuse on Lombardi's head. "Ernie's Sit -Down Strike," "Schnozz's Snooze" were some of the milder nicknames attached.

It turned out that the play and its result had a logical root: It was almost suffocatingly hot in Cincinnati that day and Lombardi subsequently revealed he'd been feeling a little dizziness as the inning in question began. Bulldog that he was, he stayed the course until Charlie Keller's train smashed into his platform. It is also forgotten that, though nothing close to Lombardi's physical bulk, Charlie Keller didn't earn the nickname King Kong because he was a wisp of a man. Lombardi took so much abuse over the play that, in later years, the combination of that abuse plus a possibility of guilt over backup catcher Will Hershberger's suicide the same season may have prodded Lombardi himself to attempt suicide.