The distances between bases and from the mound to home plate are the same. Infielders still turn double plays, pitchers still outfox hitters with curves and sliders, and managers still like the sacrifice bunt.

One reason for baseball's enduring popularity, wrote columnist George Will in 2004, "is the absence of abrupt discontinuities in the evolution of this game."

But expand your scope, and you'll find much that, 59 years later, is virtually unrecognizable. From the money to the media, the amenities to the attendance, the national reach of its franchises to the international makeup of its players, baseball in 1950 is as different from 2009 as York is from New York.

Back then, the Phillies and Yankees were two of just 16 major-league teams clustered in the same 10 cities - all but one east of the Mississippi and north of Washington - they had occupied since 1903. Six of them drew fewer than a million fans that season, two - the Philadelphia A's and St. Louis Browns - fewer than 310,000. The typical franchise was barely worth $2.5 million, the Phillies less, the Yankees much more.

Some fielders still left gloves at their positions. Hitters choked up on stumpy bats. Starting pitchers completed games. There were no helmets. Uniforms were stiflingly hot flannel. Bats were white ash, the leather gloves stiff and primitive.

Players earned an average of $13,000 a year and were bound to their teams like indentured servants. Many Phillies lived in rowhouses, took buses to the ballpark and, in the off-season, worked as bartenders or, like Phils catcher Andy Seminick, as a clerk at the neighborhood Acme.

They drank beer and whiskey and consumed aspirin like popcorn but knew nothing about steroids. And most of them, as the half-page Camels ad in the Oct. 4, 1950, Inquirer Sports section proudly touted, smoked.

All four games in the '50 Series were played in the daylight and lasted an average of 21/2 hours. Players traveled between cities in Pullman rail cars. They shared rooms with teammates at the Warwick or the Hotel Pennsylvania and lingered in lobbies where they seldom were bothered for autographs.

They didn't watch videotape of opponents. They didn't see highlights of themselves on the evening news because, as Phils president David Montgomery pointed out, there was no evening news. They weren't constantly scrutinized by YouTube-obsessed bloggers or ESPN. Their fans read dry newspaper reports, often without quotes, that crusty, fedora-wearing sportswriters typed and filed via Western Union.

Most fans never saw their favorite players except in newspaper photos or on trading cards. With TV still a luxury, radio was the medium of choice. The average ticket went for $1.50. At Shibe Park, 3,000 World Series bleacher seats sold for $1 apiece. The most expensive seats were $6.50 and $7.25. Ballpark amenities meant hot dogs and programs.

Umpires made calls more quickly and emphatically and weren't hounded by the ubiquitous eye of the TV camera.

And, maybe most significantly, in that '50 Series, all of the players on the Phillies and Yankees were white, the last time that happened.

"It's still a very good game," said Montgomery, who was 4 when he watched the '50 Series on a TV his father had purchased exclusively for that purpose. "When you stop and think about it, we've had to make surprisingly few changes to deal with the increase in athleticism since 1950. It's still 60 feet, 6 inches from the pitcher's mound to home. It's still 90 feet between the bases. And there are just as many bang-bang plays at first base.

"But there are 30 teams now, not 16, so it's almost twice as hard to win a championship. And there's no question that an awful lot else has changed since 1950."

Changes to come

In Washington, ongoing congressional hearings that year had upheld baseball's unique monopoly but prompted some players to bolder thinking. That October, some of them raised a radical question: Why should the $800,000 NBC was paying to televise the World Series go exclusively to the owners?

Competitively, the St. Louis Browns, Boston Braves and Philadelphia A's had begun to understand that their cities were not big enough to accommodate two teams, at least not in an era when the Yankees were drawing 2 million a season and using that revenue edge to win five straight World Series.

While no franchise had relocated in nearly a half-century, shifting population, falling attendance, and the increasing feasibility of transcontinental transportation now made that more possible.

In Philadelphia, Connie Mack's sons were pondering that very thing as, incompetently, they dealt with the debt their 87-year-old father had accumulated. The franchise, which had won five World Series in its 49-year history, had attracted just 309,000 fans in 1950 and now had to compete with a pennant-winning tenant in its own ballpark.