1973: The Year of Nolan Ryan

Annoyingly enough, the media has dubbed this season the 'Year of the Pitcher' because of the rash of no-hitters being thrown. This is just foolishness, as this season doesn't have more no-hitters than more than a handful of other seasons.

With Garza throwing the 5th no-hitter of the season last night, it brought this season into a tie with 1973. In that season, Nolan Ryan had arguably his best season as a pitcher. Becoming only the 4th player in Major League history, and the last to do so, to throw 2 no-hitters in a a single season, Ryan finished his highest in the Cy Young voting that year. He lost to Jim Palmer, despite having a mind boggling 383 strikeouts.

For a player bemoaned as over-rated by some, it is fascinating to look at Nolan Ryan's statistic and wonder how anyone could come up with that idea. If the objective of a pitcher is to give his team the best chance to win each day he takes the mound, Nolan Ryan did that. Not only did he throw 7 no-hitters in his career, when none of his contemporaries even threw 3, he took 24 games into the 7th inning with a chance for a no-hitter only to have them broken.

Above that, Ryan holds the record for most strikeouts in a 9 inning no-hitter with 17, on July 15, 1973.

And that's the game we are going to talk about today.

The 1965 All-Star Game Review

"They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays." – Ted Williams

With this broadcast, we have the lone full game that features a Willie Mays homerun. Willie didn’t waste any time as he took the second pitch he saw deep into the left-center stands. Mays, wearing Billy Williams batting helmet, batted lead off in this game. Mays batted leadoff in 8 All-Star Games, something he rarely did in the regular season.

A pledge, of sorts...

I'd like to thank all that have shown great interest in the blog. I recently added the email tab and had no idea that there was this kind of following to the writing. I thought, in large part, that a great deal of this was just me writing to myself.

So, with that in mind, starting next Tuesday I pledge to finish out the baseball season with a post every week. Next Tuesday will obviously cover a review of the broadcast and film quality of the 1965 MLB All-Star Game that just aired. After that, there are a few clips I still haven't brought up and I will begin to catalogue for those who aren't in the 'trading community' which full game broadcast we DO know we have and what quality they are.

Again, thank you all for your support and hopefully we will have a lot more to talk about in the coming weeks.

Where the 1965 Recording came from

Despite not hearing back from MLB directly, The New York Post was able to shed some light on where the broadcast came from:

The black and white film's arrival at MLB Network makes for a good story, too. The only known recording of the game came to Secaucus, N.J., eventually, starting from an Alaskan TV station. Years ago, the biggest televised sports and news events wound up in film reel boxes in Alaska and Hawaii for viewing by U.S. servicemen, then shipment to our servicemen stationed further into the Far East.

The 1965 All-Star Game reels made it, somehow, from Minnesota to Alaska, to the Sports Museum of New England, then to MLB Productions. There is still an Alaska, August, 1965, postmark on the packaging containing the three reels.

I almost wonder if our pointing out that MLB acquired prints from the SMNE in the article from a few years ago jogged MLB's memory that they did in fact acquire some prints.

Doubtful.

Still very grateful this is seeing the light of day.

New Game Alert: 1965 All-Star Game

On July 11th, at 8 pm ET MLB Network has listed that they will be airing the 1965 MLB All-Star Game. This will be the first airing of the game that I know of since the original broadcast. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail as I will save that for when the broadcast actually happens but needless to say I've got some feelers out to try and find where this broadcast popped up from.

I just wanted to throw this up to give people a heads-up of the coming broadcast.

36th MLB All-Star Game (1965)
July 11th, 2010 @ 8 pm ET on MLB NETWORK

(Bob) Moose hunting

This now marks the THIRD reference to Bob Moose on this blog. When we reached the 2nd reference, I remarked how improbable even that instance was.

Bob Moose, who tragically died in an automobile accident on his 29th birthday, authored the 2nd No Hitter in Shea Stadium history. This achievement came on September 20, 1969.

I really didn't think any footage from this game existed, however I was watching a Pirates/Cubs game on Memorial Day when this clip was shown during a commercial break.

(Lack of) 1967 World Series Complete Game Broadcasts

Ok, so let's try to get this thing figured out.

I finally found the article I KNEW I had read and that I KNEW stated that MLB had acquired 2 complete broadcasts from the 1967 Series.

Well, here is the quote:

"We know what we have in our archive. But as recently as seven years ago when MLB Productions was brought in-house, we were opening boxes that we didn't know what was in them," Scott said. "Talk about a treasure hunt for archivists. We know what we've got now. But occasionally we will discover that someone else has something that we don't."

The search for more content is a never-ending process. MLB just acquired a couple of complete games from the 1967 World Series.

The article was written for BaseballAmerica.com by J.J. Cooper and has an interview with Elizabeth Scott, Major League Baseball Productions vice president of programming and business affairs.

This article is from April 19, 2007 .

• So I tried contacting J.J. Cooper on 3 different occasions to no response.

With that avenue closed, I tried contacting MLB.

The Good News: Cubs Fail - Bad News: So Does Lefty

How glorious YouTube truly is. Because of it, we get rare footage that pops up every once in awhile. This footage may not be something MLB Network actually has, however, or else they failed miserably for not using it at all during their Baseball Seasons: 1969 special.

What we have here is actual game footage from the pennant clinching game on September 24, 1969. The Mets played the Cardinals and dispatched of future HOF'er and better-than-Rick-Wise pitcher Steve Carlton in the first inning.

First up is footage from the first inning. With Bud Harrelson at 2B and Tom Agee at 1B, Don Clendenon took a Carlton pitch deep to RF for a 3-run HR.

Two divisions, one series

For 100 years, Major League Baseball had existed in the simplest form of 2 leagues. Whether it be 154 games or 162 games, the pennants of each league were award to those who finished the marathon with the most wins. Yet, because of expansion in 1961(62) and 1969, MLB felt that with 4 new teams in each league, each league needed to be divided up into 2 divisions. To facilitate this, a league championship series was created in which the champions from each division would compete in a best of 5 series.

During the kinescope era (until 1976) there were 14 league championship series played. In the National League, that accounts for 27 games. Not a single full broadcast copy of any of those 27 games exists. In fact, the only American League Championship Series broadcast that exists prior to 1976 is of Game 2 of the 1972 series.

What we have left is snippets, brief little glimpses of actual broadcast footage. Most of these continue to exist thanks to whatever footage was used for nightly news broadcasts. Generally, those feature only the audio from the actual sports anchor in the studio and not the original television crew.

So, where to begin? The first LCS seems as good a place as any. 1969 is a year that features the oldest known copy of a color World Series broadcast. Luckily, some enterprising people had the warewithal to preserve the color 'truck feed' tapes from the 3 World Series games played at Shea Stadium. The first two games in Baltimore are preserved via CBC kinescopes. Due to this, we are able to see this series in it's entirity.

Yet, those same enterprising folks did not seem to see fit to preserve the first ever League Championship Series. The Miracle Mets were pitted against the West Champion Atlanta Braves and their offense with Hammerin' Hank and The Baby Bull Cepeda in the middle of the lineup. The Mets made quick work of said Braves in 3 games.

It is that Game 3, at Shea Stadium again, that we have SOME color footage. What we have is a Hank Aaron HR in the 1st inning off of Gary Gentry:


It was a 2 run homerun as you can see Tony Gonzalez waiting at home along with the following batter Rico Carty.


The only other broadcast glimpse we get is of Braves starter Pat Jarvis. The clip is spliced together with some MLB Films footage in the Baseball Seasons: 1969 broadcast that all these shots come from. In that scene, Mets 2B Ken Boswell takes Jarvis deep. This happened in the bottom of the 4th inning.

Obviously, if a full broadcast of this game existed, MLB would have made it availible in one way, shape or form over the last few years. Somewhere in the trading community we would have seen it pop up. Even with the lack of a full broadcast, once it again it would fantastic to see just how much of this broadcast truly exists in the MLB vault. It is a real treat to see Hank Aaron in broadcast footage as an Atlanta Braves slugger other than 715, 714 and the 1971 All-Star Game.

June 7, 1969 - Reds vs Cubs (in Living Color, I swear!)

Once again, MLB Network has provided glorious fodder for me to dredge the internet looking for exact moments their footage shows. The recent Baseball Seasons 1969 episode gave me a slew of footage I'll be talking about in the next few weeks. However, I'm going to start with yet ANOTHER Chicago Cubs game. This one comes from the World Seri....oh wait.

Anyways, let's run down the clip: