Monday, March 19, 2012

Satisfying Baseball Fix With Classic Clips

As the baseball season slowly approaches I find myself hungry for actual game footage. The Spring Training highlights are boring so I've found other resources.

The men in charge of Major League Baseball's media department have been notoriously strict about letting any game footage (whether from the past or present) appear on YouTube or anywhere else not owned by them. This is not only a major pain in the ass for devout fans of the game but it's also a huge missed opportunity to promote their product. There are nearly 100 years worth of World Series footage and an unthinkable mass of regular season video material in their vaults and yet nobody ever sees any of it.

Thankfully, YouTube does have a surprising amount of old World Series films. You can see clips of the 1937 Fall Classic between the Yankees and New York Giants; regular TV footage of the 1961 Series with at-bats by Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and Yogi Berra; highlights from the '55 World Series when the Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the Yankees; Cardinals legend Bob Gibson defeating the Red Sox at Fenway Park in Game 7 of the 1967 World Series and plenty more similar clips.

(More after the jump...)

Digging around for more vids like this, I came across a blog devoted to classic Minnesota Twins material. This tenacious blogger dug up and shared a clip that he found on a Korean website with television coverage of the 1965 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Twins with Sandy Koufax on the mound (don't know if I've mentioned this on the site yet but Koufax and my dad grew up together in Brooklyn). Check this gem out:


And here I present to you in entirety a 60-minute movie detailing the "We Are Family" Pittsburgh Pirates of 1979. It begins with highlights of their World Series victory over Earl Weaver's Baltimore Orioles and eventually (starting in Part 4) goes on to tell the whole story of the team from Spring Training on through the season. Narrated by Vin Scully along with lots of funky disco music, puffy hair, tight pajama uniforms, and Willie Stargell wit. Enjoy:





3 comments:

  1. My dad was a life long Pirates fan so thanks for putting this up.

    As long as we're on baseball, anothr blogging friend Adrian McKinty has favorably reviewed Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, so possibly this is a novel you should check out.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I hear many great things about that book but haven't sought it out yet.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It will be around whenever you want to read it, but I suspect you will enjoy it.

    ReplyDelete