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