Programming Alert: Mr. Tiger and the 1968 World Series TONIGHT (4/7/20)

With the passing of MLB HOF'er Al Kaline, MLB Network will be showing both Game 6 and Game 7 of the 1968 World Series.  As you may remember, the Motor City Kitties came back from being down 3-1 in the Series and 3-2 in the 7th inning of Game 5 to eventually become World Champions.

Game 6 begins at 8 pm. This game originally took 2:26 minutes to play.
Game 7 begins at 10 pm. This game originally took 2:07 minutes to play.

In Game 6, Kaline would go 3-for-4 with a homerun in the 5th inning off of fellow HOF'er Steve Carlton.  Kaline would go hitless in Game 7 but Jim Northrup 2-out triple in the 7th would be all the Tigers would need as they defeated the Cardinals and HOF pitcher Bob Gibson.  You can currently watch Game 7 unedited in high definition on the Tigers YouTube page.

For more 1968 Tigers content, you can check previous posts here and here.

For more on Al Kaline content, you can see read it here.

Review: 1964 All Star Game (Partial)

The 1964 All-Star Game is considered one of the most exciting games in the classic’s history.  Only 3 of the 9 innings didn’t feature scoring.  The game featured two solo homeruns by Ken Boyer and Billy Williams in the 4^th.   The National League would come from behind to win on a 3-run walk off homerun by Johnny Callison.  

Unfortunately, we don’t see any of that.

After the jump, we will discuss this recent offering of yet another 1960’s All-Star Game.

Check The Webbing: Gibby and Billy Williams Day

Editor's Note: 'Check the Webbing' will be short posts about broadcast clips found on the Web.  These types of clips either do not need extensive explanation or research, or are updates to posts already written.  

Billy Williams Day, a doubleheader from June 29, 1969, is a topic that has been discussed on numerous occasions.  Three years ago, we saw a brief clip of the final out of Game 1 from that double header at Wrigley.  Our original post back in 2012 focused on color video tape footage from the 8th inning of that first game.  

The description of the events of that clip were:

The clip seen here is of Ernie Banks driving in the 1st run of the game with an RBI single up the middle.   This clip, as well as the other Gibson shots, come from Revisiting the 1969 Cubs , a WGN produced clip that (judging by onscreen graphics) was put together in the 1990's. 

On January 31, 2017, MLB.com uploaded an extended video clip of Banks' single off of Gibson in the 8th inning.  This clip can be found on their YouTube channel.  The footage is color videotape and is complete with the Jack Brickhouse call.

Without speaking to MLB, the source of this clip most likely comes from the WGN highlight reels that were compiled throughout the season.  Many of these survived from the late 60's and early 70's.  They often times represent the only broadcast footage that remains from WGN.

The 399th Homerun for 'The Duke of ... Coogan's Bluff'?

It is jarring.  You don't expect it.  You're watching the ball jump off the bat and your brain is conditioned to think it is a routine flyball.  As the camera pans to the right, it just appears.  The right field stands at the Polo Grounds.  That is where Duke Snider's 399th career homerun landed in an unearthed video clip from MLB.com.  

This isn't the only homerun we've ever seen in the Polo Grounds, however (to my knowledge) it is the only broadcast footage of a homerun in the iconic stadium.  The Polo Grounds was the home of the New York Yankees until 1922, the Giants until 1957 and the Mets for the 1962 and 1963 seasons.  The ballpark hosted two All-Star games, neither televised and the 1951 and 1954 World Series, both of which were televised but no broadcast material survives.  Probably the most famous game ever played at The Grounds was Game 3 of the 1951 NL Playoff.  Despite the WPIX broadcast being transmitted coast-to-coast by NBC, no broadcast footage from this game survives either.   

 After the jump, we will talk about the game, the call and the true star of the clip: the ballpark.

A 'Dizzy-ing' mystery solved

The longer I stay with this hobby, the more and more I learn.  When I originally wrote about Stan Musial's final at-bat, I was left perplexed at the combination of two video pieces into one elongated clip.  

In 2013, I wrote:

"How this game was broadcast is a bit of a mystery.  Having the Dizzy Dean clips at the beginning are what is most perplexing.  In 1963, he was working games for CBS in their Game of the Week broadcasts.  On Saturday, the GOTW on CBS was Minnesota vs Yankees at Yankee Stadium with Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese as per various television listings of the day.  CBS did not have a GOTW on Sunday (although NBC did with Senators vs White Sox) instead showing NFL Football.  So Dean would have had the opportunity to get to St. Louis for the game."

After the jump, I will talk about some archival footage I stumbled upon over the weekend that helped explain where that clip of Dizzy Dean came from and when it aired.

From Maz to Sandy to Gibby: Game 7s (Kinescoped)

To restate the old sportscaster’s adage: There are no two more exciting words in sports than ‘Game Seven’.  Tonight, we will be treated to only the second World Series Game 7 in 11 years.  The last one (2011) was personally a thrill for this Cardinals fan but certainly not the most dramatic of contests.    This prolonged drought of penultimate Fall Classic games is a far cry from how baseball seasons regularly concluded during the kinescope era.  From the inaugural broadcast in 1947 thru the dramatic 1975 tilt, there were 16 World Series that took all seven games. 

Some of these were defining moments for franchises or the sport as a whole, creating iconic images that are instantly recognizable.  Of these 16 games during this period, only 7 have survived.  Below is a look at the Game 7s, how they turned out and which ones we are lucky to still have.

The 1972 Season: What has survived?

The charm of baseball exists in the peaks and valleys of a full season.  If you catch a World Series or a playoff game, you are getting a truly small sample size.  The six month scale of a season is what allows sabermetrics to have almost enough data to be relevant and allows fans to develop an opinion of their team’s players.  The World Series or All-Star game does not tell us the narrative of the season.  Instead, we get to hear the opinions of writers and broadcasters formulated through the lens of history, rather than as it is seen unfolding.   If baseball broadcasts today were archived in the scattered manner of years past, fans 30 years from now wouldn’t get to appreciate the two month long phenomenon of Puig-mania from 2013 or other like stories that come and go during the marathon of a season. 

When trying to find the most complete sampling of the oldest baseball season, it becomes a tough task with surviving baseball broadcasts.  While there are a few seasons with the All-Star Game and the entire World Series (1965, 1968) very few regular season games exist to flesh out a season.   Rolling back through the years, the 1972 season stands out, if for no other reason, because of the high volume of retained broadcast footage.

The 45th Anniversary of 'Billy Williams Day'

On a day in which Billy Williams would tie and pass Stan Musial in a doubleheader against Stan's old team, we've been treated over and over again with bits and pieces of beautiful WGN color video footage.  While I have never been able to track down (through many attempts) how much of this footage WGN held on to, I'd like to mark the anniversary of Billy Williams Day by showing you footage that doesn't contain Billy Williams!

As I pointed out in this post nearly 2 years ago, Billy Williams Day featured one of the greatest of Wrigley treats: A Gibson/Jenkins duel.  The two would both throw the entire game with Gibson giving up the lead in the bottom of the 8th.

After the jump, we get some of the 9th inning action.

"the best stuff (Lefty) ever had..."

The seven years Steve Carlton spent as a Cardinal are often just a footnote in his bio.  Most of that comes from how dominate he was as a member of the Phillies and part of that comes from being overshadowed by his teammate while a Redbird, Bob Gibson.  Despite living in that long shadow, the 24 year old left-hander would step out from it (and into the darkness of storm clouds) at least for one special night.

Sandy Koufax, Bob Feller and Don Wilson all held the modern MLB record with 18 strikeouts in a game.  Steve Carlton would write his name one strikeout better than those men while at the same time claiming a dubious honor.  More rare than a Perfect Game, an 18+ strikeout nine inning game has only happened 20 times since 1900.  Even rarer is striking out that many batters and losing a nine inning game.  Carlton's game is one of only four such games since 1900.  

How do we know that this is the Steve Carlton 19 strikeout game?  It takes a bit of sleuthing but with the evidence provided, it is pretty conclusive.  

Two Cubs, One At-Bat and Jim West swears

There are two 'departments' of baseball history.  World Series champions, home run totals, consecutive games played and the numbers of the game which are so important to comparing eras and weaving the fabric of the game of baseball over nearly a century and a half make up one side of the sport's history.  The other, that which gives us the narrative we pass down to our children in hopes of making them, too, fall in love with the annual marathon we endure is that of moments.  These moments help us illustrate the greatness of a player, the importance of an event and sometimes to show that no matter how many games you watch, you are bound to come across something you've never seen before.  Today's post is one of those moments.

 

By pure happenstance I was watching some WGN clips someone had given me a long time ago and found a video I apparently gave no thought to.  Expanding the scope of this blog to include more mid-1970's content, I ignored a video about the 1974 Cubs.  This, apparently, was a huge mistake on my part because in it we get to see the height of the 'Mad Hungarian' persona and the Cubs being, well...the Cubs.

"...remember the stance, remember the swing..."

Those are the words Harry Caray uttered as Stan stood in against Jim Maloney of the Cincinnati Reds on September 29, 1963.  That would be Stan Musial's final day as an active player in Major League Baseball.  That season, with it known to be Stan's last, the Cardinals made a furious dash towards the pennant.  They would win 10 straight games to put themselves 1 game out of first place with 10 games to play and starting a 3 game home series vs the first place Dodgers.  They would be swept, losing 8 of their last 10, to finish 6 games out of first.

Stan played most of his career on newsreels.  The Cardinals won the pennant 5 times during Stan's career, all before KSDK in St. Louis ever went on the air.  What survives of his career in the form of television broadcasts is an abbreviated game vs the Dodgers in 1959 and segments of his final game in St. Louis from 1963.  That is what I will show here.

Pops "pops" #400

I know this one is outside the range I traditionally write about, but this clip involved both a historic milestone and the St. Louis Cardinals, so I couldn't pass it up.

Willie Stargell, it is said, had atleast 100 career homeruns suppressed by spending his early career in Forbes Field.  With a 20 foot high chainlink fence protecting RF and a 457 fence in left-centerfield, many believe that he would have at the very least reached the 500 Homerun plateau should he have played in a more neutral park.

Whether or not this is all true, Stargell was well regarded as one of the most prolific power hitters of the late 60's and entire 70's.

 On June 29, 1977, Stargell hit his 400th career homerun off of Eric Rasmussen of the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium.

Bob Gibson in COLOR! (and Billy Williams Day)

A treasure trove of color broadcast clips come from what WGN has saved over the years.  What exactly they saved as far as just clips or full length games, no one really knows.  However, there have been a plethora of video clips in the trading community that people have seen so often, they just take for granted.  However, the other day a clip caught my eye that I had never seen before.

That man standing on the mound, in beautiful color video tape, is Bob Gibson.  He is standing in the middle of the field at Wrigley Field, pitching against the 1st place Chicago Cubs.  What game this is and what the rest of the footage shows, after the jump.

One He Got at Shea

If I told you to name the Top 3 triples hitters in Cardinals history, I'd imagine at least one of those 3 names would include Lou Brock. If it did, you'd be wrong. Lou actually was 4th All-Time on the Cardinals triple list and as another testiment to his greatness, Stan Musial tops the list with 36 more in his career.

But this post is only about one of Lou Brock's triples, one he hit into the spacious right centerfield gap at Shea Stadium.

Happy New Year and 1971 Cardinals

Happy New Year to all. This week, I'll be posting a few clips of 1971 St. Louis Cardinals broadcast footage. I will preface this as saying that MLB has already informed me that these come from highlight videos and that actual full game broadcasts do not exist. That's their official statement, take it for what it's worth.

First up, we have a clip of "Lefty" Steve Carlton at Wrigley Field. Before we get into other stuff, let's nail down a few parameters. First off, the two Cardinals in this clip are Joe Torre and Steve Carlton. Both were on the team together from 1969-1971. Furthemore, per uniwatch, the St. Louis Cardinals switched to the pullover tops that Torre and Carlton are both wearing for the first time in the 1971 season. So while Torre was with the Cardinals through the 1974 Season, Steve Carlton painfully was not.



With that in mind, let's get into the action.