LizzieMaine
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- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
Dustin Pedroia's knees say "Manny Machado is a pig."
Dustin Pedroia's knees say "Manny Machado is a pig."
Baseball was still being shown in what's now called "standard definition" up until the 2002 World Series, when HD telecasting began. Anything from before that is going to look blurry when blown up to modern HD standards. Looks fine when you watch on a 17 inch black and white set, though.
The window for surviving television footage of baseball is surprisingly narrow. The earliest game to survive complete is game 7 of the 1952 World Series, preserved by NBC as a kinescope, and there are a number of scattered World Series and All Star Games thru the sixties. But the earliest surviving full game to survive on color videotape is a regular-season Red Sox game from 1967, and the earliest complete World Series to survive on tape is 1969. The networks didn't begin to methodically save World Series games until 1975 -- and most teams didn't preserve their own broadcasts until the 1980s. That's why when you see "greatest games" features on cable, they're drawn from such a narrow pool.
Red Sox fans are lucky -- WHDH-TV saved quite a bit of random videotape and most of it ended up at the New England Sports Museum, where bit by bit it's been trickling out onto the grey market. Few of the games in this archive are complete, but there are many tantalizing fragments. Here, for example, is the only known videotape footage of a game from Sick's Stadium in Seattle -- ten minutes of clips from a 20-inning Red Sox-Pilots game in 1969, a game I have vivid memories of watching live and wondering when they were ever gonna wrap it up.
As far as the future survival of digital recordings, while all current games are being stored that's no indication that they'll survive. Try to find a computer you can play your old floppy discs on and then imagine what it'll be like for MLB trying to play current mp4 files in 2050.
The Kids and I did our annual visit to America's Most Beloved Ballpark (TM) yesterday to see the Red Sox take on a Little League team that somehow got into the Baltimore Orioles' equipment trunk and stole their uniforms. Sox won 13-7, but not for lack of ineptness on their own part, not the least of which proceeded from that overcooked meatwad Nathan Eovaldi, who gave away five runs in two innings before a merciful extraction.
We sat in the last row of the right field grandstand, right near an outraged fellow with a British accent who demanded to know why the cost of beverages was not included in his ticket price. Is that a thing in the UK? No wonder hooliganism is such a problem. As usual, my seat was behind a pole, but whoever had the seats next to ours didn't show up, and a little judicious scooting allowed us a fine view. Fenway's upgraded family-friendly usher corps, which fifty years ago was made entirely of beefy red-faced fellows named Doyle who'd grab you by your neck and haul you back to your seat if you cruised, was nowhere in evidence to shoo us back.
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The cuisine, was, as always, up to the expected standard except on one point -- the mustard is now furnished by French's. BRING BACK GULDENS. Harry M. Stevens must be revolving on his grill.
One thing that struck me -- the current fad among modern hitting coaches stressing "launch angle" has produced far too many slap-hitting infielders who think they need to aim for the fences with ridiculous swooping uppercut swings that look like a cross between a little kid playing wiffle ball and a terrified farmer trying to kill a rabid weasel with a hoe. The result is a ton of spectacular pop flies, enough strikeouts to keep the air moving comfortably on a humid afternoon, and practically no ground balls. In all of yesterday's game the two third basemen received, according to my scorecard, precisely one fielding chance between them -- and that one led to a throwing error. What ever became of Brooks Robinson?
I think my favorite thing about Fenway is the smell -- that sweet-and-sour odor of old hot-dog water that saturates the place, blended with essence of damp concrete. Now that you don't have everything suffused with the reek of cigarettes and cigars, the true aroma of the place is allowed to waft gently to the surface.
I've never smelled that particular old-ballpark smell anywhere else. Olympic Stadium in Montreal, when I used to go there, always smelled like a parking garage.
Just seeing underneath the bleachers and that wonderful green of Fenway brings back fun memories of my time in Boston.
It's definitely a home-run oriented game for the moment - the algorithms have deemed it so - but that can change as some team will win with a squad of single and double hitters and baserunners, etc., and then everyone will try to copy it.
Also, they need to figure out what the heck is going on with the ball as that's also part of it.
The Cubs I no longer consider a lock on the Central D, but lately the team has been playing real baseball: base
hits, thievery, squeeze play, and have proven that playing the game the way it was meant to be played is a far
superior approach than analytic home run derbyism; however, despite a more than adequate pitching rotation
and capable hitters, something is missing besides of late a strong bullpen. Cannot quite put my finger on it
but the road kills are mounting and the deck has been accordingly reshuffled.
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Love Fenway, the old Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field-each unique unto itself.