Opening Day at Shea (1972)

When it comes to 'important' games in a baseball season, ones you can point to on the schedule and know they are coming are few and far between.  Milestone games, pennant clinching games, postseason games and Opening Day are the few that you know are going to happen at least the day before they do.  This, you would think, would lend itself to being captured on kinescope or video tape.  Opening Day also is (usually) guaranteed to feature the best pitchers on each team going against each other.

Yet very few Opening Days have survived in baseball collecting.  In fact, I only know of two large selections of Opening Day games that still exist before 1977.  I'm going to talk about one of those today.

Coming full circle

Even though it isn't updated nearly as much as I would hope, this blog has been going for nearly 6 years now.  A labor of love, I get great joy with every new broadcast clip I stumble across.  So, it is with that in mind that I get to present the first ever clip I talked about on here.

Thanks to MLB.com, we finally get to see the full clip of Clemente's great grab against the Cubs at Wrigley field that I described in my post "Clemente vs Cubs Regular Season Broadcast (1970-1971)".  Per the label, it is indeed July 2, 1971.  It is, however, not an NBC GOTW.  As I said back in January of this year, that is Jack Brickhouse making the call, which means this is color footage leftover from a WGN telecast.  As I have asked WGN in the past, they say they have no full games tucked away in any archives.  What we see here may be all we get.  However, it is great to see an update to something that I "found" almost 6 years ago.

Thanks for all the page views and enjoy the clip!

Duke Snider's 2000th Hit (in COLOR)

Happy 4th of July!

With the Cardinals playing the Angels this week, it will be the first time this Cardinals fan gets to see Albert Pujols take swings against his former team in a real game.  For 11 years, he was the face of the franchise, the team's perennial MVP.  As late as 2011, fans couldn't think of him as wearing any other uniform than the Birds on the Bat.

It is always a strange sight when we see players who dominate the landscape wearing one uniform don another cities colors.  Whether it be the likes of Hank Aaron as a Brewer, Willie Mays as a Met or Babe Ruth as a Boston Brave, it just doesn't feel right.  So, when we talk about today's clip, it seems strange to see Duke Snider wearing a New York Mets uniform.

Seven Seconds with Pete Falcone

Although outside the 'kinescope' era and not very long of a clip, I felt it was still worth mentioning this clip I stumbled upon.  

Last week on Fox Sports Midwest, they ran a segment on Cardinals with the number 41. During that segment, there was a short seven second clip about Pete Falcone.  Falcone was a starter for the St. Louis Cardinals for the 1977 and 1978 seasons. The game in which they showed featured Falcone facing the Pittsburgh Pirates.  

After the jump, I'll talk about the inning showcased, the players faced and something about the uniforms I learned.

"...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.

Stan Musial, 1920 - 2013

To paraphrase Ford Frick:

" [There goes] baseball's perfect warrior, [there goes] baseball's perfect knight..."

"...a ballplayer who gave all he had to give."

One of the great things about classic broadcasts surviving is that it allows our minds to be adjusted properly to the actuality of how history unfolded.  For all the times someone from an earlier generation says, "no one could hit 'em like the Mick" or "hitters were afraid of Hoot", the footage speaks for itself.  The deification of players long gone must face the eye test.

That is in respect to their accomplishments in the game.  For some men, their legend grows not just because of how they played the game but rather how they lived their lives.  In that respect, Roberto Clemente deserves every bit of praise he has heaped on him.

While he spent much of his career lambasted as a 'whiner' about physical ailments, Clemente as the player was as great as they come.  Hidden in baseball siberia, the Pirates OF'er was a four time batting champion and NL MVP.  He twice won the World Series and was such a superb defensive OF'er that he won the Gold Glove every year from 1961 until his death.   There is no questioning Clemente's talent.

His legacy as a man is far greater.  Clemente tragically died 40 years ago this past New Year's Eve in an overloaded supply plane headed for Nicaragua that crashed shortly after take-off.  A national hero in Puerto Rico, Clemente was often long winded and full of fire when talking about a whole variety of things related to the game of baseball.  As proud as a man humbled by God could be, Clemente was a ballplayer who embraced his adopted city of Pittsburgh so much so that according to Myron Cope's 1966 Sports Illustrated feature, he pushed his teammates to play better because he felt "we owe these people another pennant."

Clemente truly was a one of a kind player and his baseball legacy, as well as that of a good man, deserves to live on.

Listed below are the known (mostly) complete games of Clemente's career:

The Original "Game 162" (October 1, 1967)

First and foremost, Merry Christmas to everyone.  I hope Santa brings you lots of classic baseball on DVD this year!

With the airing of the MLB Productions special Fenway Park Centennial: 100 Years on MLBNetwork the other night, I thought it would be nice to compile a list of the entirety of known footage from the October 1, 1967 game between the Red Sox and Twins.

 
The best part about running this site is having to keep a constant eye out for new footage and try to catalog both in print and your mind what has been seen, while trying to piece it together to understand how much of a broadcast has survived.  With this new program, I got a brief glance at some footage I had never seen thus expanding on the amount of this game that was covered.  After the jump, I'll talk about this 'Game 162' and what we have.

"McCarver Pops Up" (in color)

Following defeat in the 2012 NLCS, Mike Matheny joined an elite group of Hall of Fame Cardinals mangers in one aspect.  Up 3 games to 1 in a best-of-seven series, Tony LaRussa (1996), Whitey Herzog (1985) and Red Schoendist (1968) all ended up losing their series.  It is the last of those we talk about today.  

As I've made clear before on here, as a Cardinals fan 1968 is one of my greatest disappointments.  Two of my favorite Cardinals teams throughout history were the 1985 and 1968 Cardinals and both eventually blew near certain World Series championships.  More frustrating is that we have a full kinescoped set of the 1968 World Series, with pre and postgame footage and yet nothing for the 1967 series the Cardinals actually won.

Most all of you know, Gibson pitched on short rest in Game 7.  In the 7th inning, Gibby got 2 quick outs before giving up 2 soft single.  Curt Flood fell down on a hard hit liner to CF and Jim Northrup ended up with an RBI triple.  Bill Freehan would double in Northrup to make it 3-0.  In the 9th, the Tigers tacked on a 4th run and Shannon would homer in the bottom of the 9th with 2 outs to get the score to 4-1.  McCarver stood in as the potential last out and that is what we are going to talk about.

The 1975 NLCS (a brief celebration)

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.