Yesterday in baseball

I watched the 1974 All-Star Game courtesy of ESPN Classic (it was caught by the "Pittsburgh" wish list on my TiVo because it was played there). I was born about two months after that game was played, and hoped to see my "namesake," Jim "Catfish" Hunter. It turned out that ESPN Classic's edited 2-hour version left out the sixth inning, in which he pitched well, but included the seventh inning, in which he gave up a home run.

He was wearing the bright yellow shirt of the Oakland A's, which actually seemed like a fairly reasonable uniform choice, given that the White Sox, Twins, and Royals were all wearing powder blue uniforms. It's hard to believe now that anyone ever thought that looked good, especially on the Sox and Twins. Fortunately, this was a few years before the Astros switched to their uniforms with the multi-hued horizontal stripes.

I have to admit that I kind of missed having the balls, strikes, outs, and runs continuously on the screen the way they are on baseball games these days, but in all other respects, the amount of graphics that NBC was putting on the screen in 1974 was perfectly adequate. And there were no little sound effects when they popped on and off, either. The big innovation in the coverage of this game was a mobile cameraman stationed in the dugouts; announcer Curt Gowdy seemed very happy about the fact that now the viewers could get the same view of the game that a manager gets.

Something else Curt Gowdy said at one point which seems to have passed into the mists of history on network sports broadcasts: "We now pause for station identification. This is the NBC television network." Can't take valuable time away from promoting tomorrow night's prime-time lineup these days, you know; just have the affiliates slap their logo on the bottom of the screen, and that's it.