As the season enters the final weekend, all but one divisional race remains. The last two teams standing in the National League Central are the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates. These two former National League East combatants found themselves tied for the top spot just over a week ago. It was a back and forth three team race reminiscent of another season the Pirates and Cardinals came down to the wire.
In 1974, the NL East saw a season long race between three teams: the Cardinals, Phillies and Pirates. For most of the season, the Phillies led the division with the Cardinals chasing them and towing the Pirates along behind. At the end of July, the Cardinals finally caught the Phillies to move into first place. In the last week in August, the Pirates nudged back ahead, only to find themselves tied with the Cardinals on September 29th at 85-74 a piece.
Going into the final series of the season, the Cubs were in dead last in the division and had just closed up their Wrigley season by dropping 2 of 3 to the Cardinals. They now took on the Pirates while the Cardinals traveled to Montreal. Both division leaders won their games on the 30th, remaining tied going onto October 1st.
The Cardinals would send Bob Gibson to the mound against former Cardinal Mike Torrez. Gibson would give the Cardinals a chance with 7 innings of 1 run ball, only to relinquish a 2-run HR to Mike Jorgensen in the 8th putting the Expos ahead 3-2. The Pirates would win 6-5 vs the Cubs at Three Rivers, giving the Pirates a 1 game lead with 1 game to play.
On October 2nd, the Cardinals were rained out in Montreal so the Pirates took the field only needing a win to force the end of the season and a trip for them to the NLCS. Down to their last strike, it looked like they weren't going to get that win.
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.
Technically, his last homerun came in Game 4 of the 1972 NLCS but this one was the 240th of Clemente's career. This longtripper came against Roberto's favorite victim at his favorite home-away-from-home. All of this in beautiful color videotape! More about this simple discovery after the jump.
Last January, I showed a series of clips that involved Hank Aaron's 714th homerun in Cincinnati. This was color videotape footage that had Milo Hamilton's call of the events over the video. The original post is below:
Well, MLB finally released more of the video clip. You can find it here on their YouTube channel. The video is nearly three and a half minutes long, however you can clearly see the video is edited down in a certain part. More after the jump.
These are the words Juan Marichal uttered in 2009 to Bob Costas about his 1965 incident involving a bat and Johnny Roseboro's head. Marichal's defense has always been that tensions were running high and Roseboro had attempted to hit him with a ball in the back of the head. Those tensions were always present in the Dodgers/Giants rivalry. In another flare up, coincidentally involving Marichal again, the Dodgers and Giants began a beanball war that erupted into a benches clearing junior-high dance late in the 1971 season. We have a great clip of this thanks to KTTV. More after the jump.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
