Opening Day at Shea (1972)

When it comes to 'important' games in a baseball season, ones you can point to on the schedule and know they are coming are few and far between.  Milestone games, pennant clinching games, postseason games and Opening Day are the few that you know are going to happen at least the day before they do.  This, you would think, would lend itself to being captured on kinescope or video tape.  Opening Day also is (usually) guaranteed to feature the best pitchers on each team going against each other.

Yet very few Opening Days have survived in baseball collecting.  In fact, I only know of two large selections of Opening Day games that still exist before 1977.  I'm going to talk about one of those today.

Coming full circle

Even though it isn't updated nearly as much as I would hope, this blog has been going for nearly 6 years now.  A labor of love, I get great joy with every new broadcast clip I stumble across.  So, it is with that in mind that I get to present the first ever clip I talked about on here.

Thanks to MLB.com, we finally get to see the full clip of Clemente's great grab against the Cubs at Wrigley field that I described in my post "Clemente vs Cubs Regular Season Broadcast (1970-1971)".  Per the label, it is indeed July 2, 1971.  It is, however, not an NBC GOTW.  As I said back in January of this year, that is Jack Brickhouse making the call, which means this is color footage leftover from a WGN telecast.  As I have asked WGN in the past, they say they have no full games tucked away in any archives.  What we see here may be all we get.  However, it is great to see an update to something that I "found" almost 6 years ago.

Thanks for all the page views and enjoy the clip!

Duke Snider's 2000th Hit (in COLOR)

Happy 4th of July!

With the Cardinals playing the Angels this week, it will be the first time this Cardinals fan gets to see Albert Pujols take swings against his former team in a real game.  For 11 years, he was the face of the franchise, the team's perennial MVP.  As late as 2011, fans couldn't think of him as wearing any other uniform than the Birds on the Bat.

It is always a strange sight when we see players who dominate the landscape wearing one uniform don another cities colors.  Whether it be the likes of Hank Aaron as a Brewer, Willie Mays as a Met or Babe Ruth as a Boston Brave, it just doesn't feel right.  So, when we talk about today's clip, it seems strange to see Duke Snider wearing a New York Mets uniform.