True Twin Bill

For me, if there's one thing the baseball lockout accomplished which I rather like is that it forces MLB to play true doubleheaders. Doubleheaders are two games played on one ticket.

Twin bills, as they were often called, were at one time rather prevalent. Going through some things in the attic sometime last year I stumbled across my 1971 Detroit Tiger yearbook. The Detroit Nine that year played 18 scheduled doubleheaders between the road and home. 18. Now true twin bills are extremely rare. Typically baseball has one scheduled over the course an entire season, if that.

The Tigers actually played one last Wednesday (May 4) but I couldn't make it. There was simply too much work which had to get done, and even a self employed grunt has to have something of a conscience. But things had eased up a vague bit this week and I decided the hell with it, I was taking the afternoon off and going to yesterday's. Who knows when the next one will be?

I used to live for doubleheaders. As a teen I would check the schedule out the instant it was available and mark them off, scrounging up the money to attend as many as I could. Once I had a family of my own the entire crew would go, although by then there was usually only one a season. By the early 1990s they only appeared due to scheduling necessities. 

There appeared to be few such necessities. Oh, there are the atrocities of what are called day-night doubleheaders, where one game is played in the early afternoon and the other in the evening. Yet they require separate tickets and are not, so far as I'm concerned anyway, true twin bills.

I could go into the reasons why things have changed. But that would quickly become a screed, which this threatens to do as it is. I don't want to do that. I simply want to revel in the fact that, for one Tuesday afternoon, all was right in the baseball world. I was happy to take advantage of it.