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 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.
Joining the 500 Homerun club is hard enough, but often it seems getting from 499 to 500 can be the hardest part. Players will often go through an extended stretch before reaching the milestone event. That is what made Albert Pujols hitting 499 and 500 in the same game (not just the same day) all the more rare. Sadly, the last 25 years of the homerun deluge took value away from reaching those counting number milestones. You would think, in 2014 with at least 4 cable channels carrying games nationally weekly, that the game would be carried outside of the local markets. However, much like when Mays or Aaron hit their 500th, coverage was as minimal as it could get.
As was pointed out in this post a few years ago, nine players hit their 500th homerun between 1960 and 1980. During that time, many owners still saw television broadcasts as cutting into their attendance. A few did not. Thanks to major markets like New York and Chicago, some of these events were televised. In the case of Ernie Banks, WGN actually preserved homeruns 498, 499 and 500.
Ernie Banks ended the 1969 season needing three homeruns to become the 9th member of the club. In speaking with Jack Brickhouse during Spring Training, Banks said that he'd hoped the number 500 would come on April 14th at the home opener "in the friendly confines of beautiful Wrigley Field". Banks would be right about hitting 500 at Wrigley, but would be off by nearly a month.
With the regular season coming to an end, we are beginning to get the 'list' programs by MLB Network. This is good for picking out bits and pieces of old broadcast footage that may not have been seen before or may be expanded on in their clip shows.
One such clip popped up during their broadcast of "The 40 Greatest Teams of All Time". Listed as the 2nd greatest team of all time, the Cincinnati Reds met up with the Boston Red Sox as what is widely regarded as the greatest World Series of All Time. However, before the Reds could head of to Beantown, they would have to dispatch of the other NL powerhouse of the 70's, the Pittsburgh Pirates.
It is rare that we get to compare both videotape and kinescope but MLB.com afforded us that luxury recently with a montage videotaped clip from the 1970 World Series.
Well known as the 'Brooks Robinson Series', the video clip seen here offers a glimpse at what the 1970 World Series looked like in color on NBC. The series, as it exists to collectors, is in the form of Games 1 thru 4 in black and white kinescope and Game 5 in color videotape.
After the jump, I'll show some side by side shots of the kine against the videotaped footage.
