If you're not a big baseball fan like me, then maybe you simply appreciate the fact that historic footage from 90 years ago could be discovered so amazingly preserved. Or maybe you're just going to yell at me because Obama's destroying America and here I am talking about sports. I can live with it either way. But what you're about to see is truly amazing.
It was recently discovered by staff at the Library of Congress, and brought to my attention by my friend Lee Panas, who is also the author of a very good book about modern baseball statistics if you're interested in that sort of thing. As the story explains, the footage was shot with nitrate film, which was pretty high-quality stuff in its day but given the newness of the technology in 1924, it was far from consistent in its performance. You open up a 90-year-old cannister of nitrate film, what you get could be a complete mess.
But if you're extremely fortunate, it could look stunning like this:
One of the things that struck me was the multiple camera angles. Whoever shot this either moved around the stadium or had a crew set up. They thought it through. And they were skilled enough with close-ups to get that really nice shot of Calvin Coolidge sitting in the sweet box seats just as he took his hat off.
(The music appears to have been written recently and dubbed in but I'm not certain about that.)
From a baseball perspective, times have certainly changed in that we see all-time great Walter Johnson enter the game for the Senators in the ninth inning and pitch the final four innings of the 12-inning contest. Johnson had started Game 5 just two days earlier at the Polo Grounds - and pitched eight innings while taking the loss in a 6-2 Giants win - so he came back on only one day's rest for this four-inning stint. Would that ever happen today? In the seventh game of the World Series, maybe for a hitter or two, or even a full inning. Four innings? No way.
The walk-off single - a term not used, of course, until many years later - came from rookie center fielder Earl McNeely, who was 26 years old at the time and had only just come to the Senators from the minors in August of that season. It was interesting to see how the reactions to the game-winning hit by both the players and the fans were not that different from what we see today. I remember fans streaming onto the field after World Series wins as recently as the 1980s before MLB security put a stop to it. I had no idea it was going on as early as the 1920s.
By the way, irony of ironies, the Giants play in Washington starting tonight in Game 1 of their National League Division Series. MJ is a big Giants fan, but we let him work here anyway, and he's already mad at me for very vocally rooting for the Pirates on Wednesday night. He probably thinks I'm sticking it to him by pulling a Giants loss from 90 years in the past and throwing it up onto the site. But hey. After what happened to the Tigers last night in Baltimore, I'm in no position to be sticking it to anyone.
