Look Smart Trivia: Blurry Baseball Uniforms of the 1980s

JasonToon posted some pics said
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Baseball season kicks off - er, gets started today for real. It makes me nostalgic for 80s baseball, because like every boring dad in America, I invest the baseball of my youth with a near-spiritual significance. Ah, what a time it was, when, powder blue on their backs, white powder up their noses, the sloppily mustachioed titans of the game roamed the fields of green plastic. Blink me out to the ballgame and indulge my hazy memories with these five blurry baseball uniforms from the arcade decade. Name all five teams first and you’ll score a $5 Meh coupon. It’s not worth what it used to be, but then what is? Insert signoff catchphrase here!

Yesterday’s video review of Cold War Crises drew a new winner out of the Look Smart woodwork. @PocketBrain was not only the first to identify all five, but the most thorough, so I’m posting their versions of the answers here out of respect:

  1. U2 spy plane incident. Francis Gary Powers shot down over USSR. Sentenced to 10 years for spying, he was returned 2 years later in a prisoner exchange.
  2. USSR invades Afghanistan in Dec. 1979, ending hopes of a Cold War truce.
  3. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted for spying for the USSR for delivering nuclear secrets. They were executed in the electric chair. Some controversy lives to this day concerning Ethel’s culpability.
  4. Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, “Operation Danube.” A joint invasion of Czechoslovakia by five Warsaw pact nations designed to stop reforms within the country and strengthened the Moscow-oriented Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
  5. Korean Airlines flight 007 Boeing 747 shot down over the USSR Sept. 1 1983. The airliner had gone off course. 269 passengers and crew killed.