All-Star Broadcast Comments

sorry, very unclear there - the quote in my last post was from one of the announcers - sounded liked either mccarver or al michael (i may be getting them way wrong, just going by their voices). but they were right

Karl: Highly recommend the '71 AS game, highlighted by Reggie's HR that almost left Tiger Stadium.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrIuUvTtdZ4

I watched the game that year, and then, just before YouTube came along, a friend gave me some VHS tapes he'd saved from when the Sports network in Toronto was showing old games during the '94 strike. Instead of repeating everything here, I'll link to something I wrote about the game after watching the tape:

https://phildellio.tripod.com/reggie.html

If you want to skip right to Reggie, it's the bottom of the third at the 56:50 mark.

No joke, I watched it just the other day! And yes, it was an excellent game!

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but when I was a kid I had a hand-me-down board game, based on the 1971 all-star game! It had little circular cards for each player, and you’d spin a dial for each PA to see whether your player hit a single, HR, struck out, double play, etc. I played with it all the time and got to know all of the early 70s pretty well, or at least their statistical tendencies as represented by the game. But until this week, I never thought to see how the actual game turned out!

you might recognize it - they kept reissuing the game throughout the late 60s to the 80s (and beyond?), with updated player dial-cards

https://i.imgur.com/HO50a4d.png

I've never seen that, no. Familiar with Strat-O-Matic, APBA--owned the '75 or '76 version--and Extra Innings, a loose-leaf binder my friend ordered in the late '70s. Amazingly, the first two are still around.

https://www.strat-o-matic.com/

http://apbagames.com/apbabaseball

Geez, so is Extra Innings, sort of (not sure that I'd trust any of these downloads, but they look okay).

https://www.tabletop-sports.com/downloads.php?cat_id=16

Looking forward to selling my copy of Quantum Baseball (1987) for dozens of dollars someday.

"Dozens of dollars"--best description I've ever heard for the clueless collector of junk (like me).

i almost mentioned it on another thread, re: being interested in stats, but for me, stats/probability was a big part of how i appreciated and learned about the game, both as a child and then around the late 2000s when i started following baseball again. as a kid, i was too young to comprehend the golden 80's cardinals era, and started being able to watch the games without shitting my pants in the late 80s/early 90s, in time to catch ozzie and willie and some of the others, but also during a relatively rare downturn in the cardinals fortunes. the games were barely visible on the tv, but i spent much more time going through my uncle's 1987 topps collection, and the aforementioned 1971 all-star board game, just looking at the stats. i remember looking at Rob Deer's card a lot, wondering what his deal was.

later on, in the 2000s, i got back into baseball almost entirely because of the advanced stats. i thought i knew pretty much everything there was to know about stats, so it was interesting to read baseball blogs that were using all these terms i'd never heard of before. WAR, sure, but also the attention paid to OBP, OPS, all the + stats. it gave me a whole new way to look at the game. it's a bit of a stretch, but it's kind of like how when you've learned how to make music, or sing, or draw or paint, it fundamentally changes how you listen to music or look at a painting. it's a great complement/contrast, i think, to the personalities and oddities of baseball players and throughout the game, which i also adore.

I mean, that's it: baseball isn't one thing, it's dozens of things. It's great plays, it's arguing about MVPs and the HOF, it's laughing at the endless absurdity of the game (some reviewers thought Bouton hated baseball because of him highlighting that aspect in Ball Four, when clearly it was just the opposite), it's trying to project a 20-year-old's phenomenal rookie year forward, it's rewatching great games from the past, it's stats, it's everything. And stats, for me, have been there right from my earliest interest in the game (part of which is that I'm a math person by inclination).

it's all that, and so much more. :) i might add to the list, it's involuntarily yelling "shit!!" whenever the ball is hit to you in the outfield

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaQlAHptguM

lol

somehow, i have never seen or read moneyball (though i've seen some clips on youtube, like that). one thing that always amazes me about professionals is how, despite that clip, so many of them say they deeply want the ball to be hit to them, every single play.

Something I also take with a huge grain of salt, and argument #937 I used to have with Morbius. He thought the whole postseason-inside-Kershaw's-head thing (or, more recently, Verlander's) was a myth, that a professional athlete can shut all that out. To me, they're prey to the same emotions anybody is. They're better at keeping that under control, most of the time, but why wouldn't Kershaw or Verlander think "Oh god, not again" at a certain point? If you don't believe that athletes can summon superhuman clutch abilities whenever they want--which they can't--why would you credit them with the superhuman ability to completely shut out fear/anxiety/etc.?

With eight defenders on the field, I'm guessing one or two really want it hit to them, five or six have cleared their minds and are just waiting for the pitch, and there's one or two Scott Hattebergs who are thinking "Please, please, not to me." And the pitcher's Dave Stieb or Nolan Ryan, he's thinking "Let's get a strikeout--I don't trust any of these bozos."

I confess all these mic'd up players are more entertaining than the booth guys.

Just got back from tennis, flipped on the game, and from another room, I swear it sounds like they're playing in an empty stadium.

did you win tennis?

I did--I've got Djokovic on Thursday...Second year, used to play as a teenager; getting much better.

Derivative Sport in Southwest Ontario

Looks interesting--I'll have to zoom in about 400%.