Saturday, April 12, 2014

"he means the tying run at the plate now..."

Those were the words Vin Scully uttered as Aaron stepped into the box to face Al Downing for the second time on that fateful April night.  

It is Masters weekend in the state of Georgia and it just so happens that this week's post is going to stay in the state for the second week in a row.  In fact, it's going to stay focused on the same game as last week.  Two years ago, follower of the blog and fellow amateur sleuth twib77 and I were discussing some clips we saw in a MLBNetwork Prime 9 special about Rule 5 Draft picks.  One such draft pick was Darrell Evans. Evans was drafted but did not sign four times before finally agreeing to terms with the Kansas City A's.  He would, however, not play a game in the Majors for the A's.  He was chosen in the 1968 Rule 5 Draft by the Atlanta Braves  He would eventually play 21 seasons in the Major Leagues, occupying both corner infield positions and in the Top 10 in walks 15 times in his career.

Evans made a career of getting on-base and doing so in the game in this shot made him a part of history. In the fourth inning of the April 8, 1974 game vs the Dodgers, Evans would reach on an error by the Dodgers' shortstop.  Standing at first, he would be 90 feet away from Hammerin' Hank as he blasted career homerun 715.




Clues that let us know this shot comes from that game really boil down to it appears to have the same lighting and color look to it as all the other NBC footage does for this game.  Also, we can see the NBC SPORTS banner to the left of the screen, which makes it extremely likely that this is more footage that has survived from that game.  Whether or not this shot comes from the 1st inning, the 4th inning or any other at-bat he had in that game is hard to tell from one screengrab.

A special thanks goes back out to twib77 for reminding me of our discussion from a few years ago.  It also helped remind me how long I've been asking MLB about this footage without much coming in the way of answers.

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