Happy Opening Night!
MLB.com gives us a 17-second clip on their YouTube channel of some vintage color videotape footage. The wonderful part of this color videotape is that it preserves the remarkable brilliance of Charlie Finley's golden A's vests.
The green stirrups with yellow socks. The yellow vests with green sleeves. The white spikes. Dressed to the Nines actually lists that this combo didn't exist. The socks, with the yellow vests should have been white. These uniforms continued to feature the big green A on them for the second season. The 1970 season would be the first season they were no longer known as the Athletics but as solely the A's. Modern baseball vests are often a terrible look due to their fit but this look is perfect and timeless.
As for the game itself, it took place July 19, 1970 at Fenway Park. More on that, after the jump.
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.
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.
