A complete kinescope of the NBC telecast of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series has been found in Bing Crosby’s private vault. (“Along with several of his classic child beatings.” — J. Elvis Weinstein)
MLB Network will apparently be showing it later this year, giving it the same treatment they gave Don Larsen’s perfect game: digging up everyone who’s still alive so they can be interviewed by Bob Costas for wraparound segments.
Baseball Related Program Activities for 2010 have begun!
And what better way to kick things off than with a 3-1 Cubs win over the Pirates at Wrigley Field that is best described as “crisp”? Both teams played solid defense, both teams pitched well (or, perhaps more likely, given these two teams, hit poorly), and in a mere 2:23 we were out of there and into the car . . . I mean, onto bicycles and L cars for the ten-minute trip back to my house.
Notes from the game:
* Stacey came along, thus taking the honorable position of our first official BRPA 2010 hanger-on.
* The game wasn’t the only thing that was crisp: a game-time temperature of 65 degrees combined with a constant breeze to keep the upper deck just cooler than cool, and convince me to pack some jeans for the trip. Maybe mittens, too: we are, after all, going to Minneapolis.
* Some fans two rows behind us, seeing Stacey taking our photo, correctly guessed that we were on a road trip. We didn’t really try to explain that while, yes, we were on a road trip, I have been sitting in that very seat for a dozen years. (Our caps may also have clued them in: I was, as usual, wearing my Cardinals cap, while Jim was wearing what must have been a Time Bandits cap–it said “TB” on the front, and I have a hard time believing that he was rooting for tuberculosis.)
* Alfonso Soriano apparently ate all his Home Run Crunch before the game, as he hit two absolute bombs.
* I’ll be surprised if anyone even comes close to taking the title of Best Shoes of BRPA 2010 from Lastings Milledge. I can’t believe that all his teammates haven’t followed his lead and started wearing yellow-trimmed cleats. Dude looks sharp.
* Jim didn’t vomit on the usher until after the fourth bag of cotton candy. Wait, no: he didn’t vomit on the usher at all, because he refused my offer to buy all his meals on the entire trip if he would eat only cotton candy at the ballpark every night.
And now to bed–tomorrow at this time, we’ll be in Kansas City!
A ball from Jeff Bennett nearly takes off Jason Michaels’s vest. Video on Flickr.
6:02 — Why, they’ve got a special graphic to use when Craig Biggio gets a hit.
6:11 — Xavier Nady, who has a great name, hits a home run to tie the Pirates-Astros game at 2.
6:21 — Hey, the Twins aren’t on WCCO anymore, which is kind of like the Cardinals not being on KMOX anymore. Herb Carneal may well be rolling in his grave already.
6:25 — The Pirates-Astros game isn’t quite as speedy now that it’s gone into extra innings.
6:32 — Perhaps somebody with more time on their hands than Levi or me — probably a member of SABR — has calculated the percentage of World Series and/or pennant winners that won their first game of the season. I’m suddenly interested in what that statistic is.
6:33 — Jason Bay hits a 2-run homer in the top of the 10th. He should be on the Devil Rays instead of the Pirates, given that both have “Bay” in their names.
6:38 — The Astros strike out, in the bottom of the 10th, for the first time in the game.
6:42 — The Pirates win a game! The Pirates win a game! And now there’s only one game in progress.
6:43 — In this
post-literate age, “DQ Grill & Chill” seems to be the new name for “Dairy Queen Brazier.” I wonder how Bob Greene feels about that. (The former columnist for the Chicago Tribune, not Oprah’s personal trainer.)
You know, after I got fired two years ago, I should have tried to contact him to commiserate. We could have had a chat over Blizzards or something. I don’t even remember exactly what our disagreement was about.
6:53 — The Twins announcers are comparing former Devil Ray and current Oriole Danys Baez to Rick Sutcliffe, and talk about how he hooks his hand around behind him before he delivers the ball. At one point, they call him “a hooker.”
5:05 — “My 29” is using the FSN graphics package, which isn’t particularly unusual, but their graphics seem to be making more noise than they currently do on FSN. Guess that’s part of the MyNetwork attitude.
5:10 — They’re not booing in Houston, they’re saying “Luke,” as in Scott, who just hit a 2-run home run.
5:16 — The Astros announcers mention that Brad Ausmus is a news junkie, and suggest that while his teammates are watching “Sportscenter,” he’s watching C-SPAN or CNBC. I’m sure Fox management sent out a quick memo with a suggestion of their own about which network should have been named there.
5:27 — A commercial for a concept I haven’t thought about for a while: Perkins restaurants.
5:35 — Watching the Pirates is making me hungry for pierogies for dinner. Good thing I have some in the freezer for just such an emergency.
5:49 — Waiting for the pierogies to thaw in boiling water, I switch to the A’s-Mariners game just to see it end, on a fly ball to Ichiro in center field.
5:50 — Meanwhile, the Pirates and Astros are already in the top of the 8th, so it’s a pretty speedy game.
5:58 — Yes, it’s sad when ballpark prices for food and souvenirs are so high that families are forced to choose one or the other, but kids are always ready to improvise.
4:00 — Baltimore Orioles at Minnesota Twins (ESPN and WFTC)
Pittsburgh Pirates at Houston Astros (FSN Houston)
4:01 — Extra Innings is carrying an over-the-air game broadcast, something I haven’t seen before on DirecTV. I guess the ability to do this is part of their new contract. It’s from “My 29” — well, not really mine, because it’s WFTC in Minneapolis/St. Paul and KFTC in Bemidji.
4:03 — They do a nice little tribute to Herb Carneal at the beginning of the Twins broadcast. I have to admit that he’s someone who was never really on my radar.
4:05 — I’m getting a little tired of “Magic Carpet Ride,” which is the music being played during a Chevrolet ad that’s been running a lot today. But I guess the members of Steppenwolf aren’t getting tired of cashing their royalty checks.
4:10 — The Orioles haven’t opened a season on the road since 1977.
4:12 — The Rockies are down 8-6 going into the bottom of the 9th, but anything can happen. 3 out of 4 Opening Day games previously played at Coors Field ended with a walk-off home run.
4:20 — An ad read by the Rockies announcers goes, in its entirety, “Hey, if you have a crack in your windshield, call Elite Glass, number one for more than one reason.” This makes the broadcast interactive, since it allows the audience to speculate endlessly about what those reasons might be.
4:24 — True, anything could have happened, from a walk-off home run to a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-type magical transformation causing the person in the mascot costume to turn into an actual small purple triceratops. But what actually happens in the bottom of the 9th is a double followed by three straight strikeouts. The new red uniforms worked for the D-Backs!
4:36 — Forget C.C. Sabathia. Kent Hrbek is looking a little large now that he’s retired.
4:37 — However, while Kent Hrbek is being interviewed, the Twins hit back-to-back home runs. So whatever he’s doing, it’s working.
4:40 — Very sad that the Menards guy isn’t in Menards commercials anymore. At least they haven’t turned him into a computer-animated character who appears at the end of the commercial as they’ve done with the Empire Carpet guy.
4:52 — Shannon Stewart of the A’s certainly looks different than he did when he was Playboy’s Playmate of the Month for June 2000 (relatively work-safe link to Wikipedia).
There’s a Cardinals version and, in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, here’s the Pirates version — but the cutest one is, of course, the one with Li’l Mister Met. (The Angels one might be
the cutest if it had monkeys — but it doesn’t.)
Levi and Mrs. Levi: are you sure you don’t want kids?
Back on March 29th, I mentioned it was a possibility, and now it’s apparently official: this is the last year the Pirates will be on KDKA, so they can capture that all-important youth demographic over on the FM dial.
Some notes from last night’s Cubs-Pirates game, which featured the two worst teams in the league performing a sloppy “After you”/”No, I insist”/”No, no, you first”/”Well, if you insist, I’ll muff this bunt” routine to see who would get the privilege of losing: 1) In my shoulder bag was a grocery sack of sage from Stacey’s garden for my seatmate, Michelle. The bag inspector at the gate looked at it askance. BI: “What’s that?” Me: Sage.” BI:”What?” Me: “Sage. It’s from a garden, for my seatmate.” BI: “What?” Me: “Sage.” BI:”Like you put on food?” Me:”Yeah. You can smell it.” [BI Smells it. Makes a face.] BI: “I’m gonna have to ask about this.” Me: [Astonished] “You’re kidding. Really. You’re not serious.” BI: “I am, too.” She called her manager over, he took one look at it and, presumably deciding that I could neither blow up the stadium with it nor injure anyone by throwing it at them, waved me into the park. 2) During the game, the season ticket holders who sit in my section–those who bothered to attend, that is–had a discussion of whether this is the worst Cubs team we’ve had to watch. I’ve been attending games at Wrigley Field since 1993, and I’ve had season tickets since 1999, and I, like all the rest, weighed in with a resounding “Yes.” You could argue that the 1997 team was worse, but it at least had Sammy Sosa doing his strikeout/homer/strikeout routine. This team didn’t even have Derrek Lee for most of the year, and Ryan Theriot’s remarkable mustache can only go so far towards making up for such bad baseball. 3) The good thing about the Cubs suffering through their third straight disappointing (and second straight flat-out bad) season is that the fair-weather fans are starting to see the storm clouds. The announced attendance for last night’s game was only 32,000 or so, way down from the 40,000+ the Cubs were drawing earlier in the year. But I’d be surprised if the actual attendance was half that. In the center field bleachers the night before, the cameramen had shown a guy stretched out flat, sleeping, and he could have easily reprised his nap in any section of the bleachers last night. Meanwhile, there were only about five beer vendors working the whole of the upper deck, and nary a Super Ropes guy in sight. It’s kinda nice to be able to stretch out a little again. It reminds me of the wonderful days of 1997, pre-Kerry Wood and that first wild card run, when you
could decide to go to the game day of, with three or four friends, buy upper deck tickets and sit pretty much anywhere. So for all you folks who love Wrigley Field but have given up on attending in recent years–I’m looking at you, Bob and Luke–this is your warning: the glory days may soon be back. Start practicing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” 4) Then, in the 8th of what had been a forgettable ballgame, Matt Capps hung a curve to Derrek Lee, who immediately reminded him of why his pitching coach had advised against such behavior. It was a beautiful night in a beautiful ballpark, and that moment was a good reminder of why we were there.
Remember, the Cardinals are no longer on KMOX. Now
it’s also possible that the Pirates may be leaving their longtime radio home, KDKA.