Baseball’s Greatest Games – 1960 World’s Series
Game 7 (Pittsburgh Pirates/A&E
DVD) + San Francisco Giants 2010 World Series
Collector’s Edition (A&E DVD Set)
Picture: C+ Sound: C+ Extras: B/B+ Main Programs: B/B+
Though
the Super Bowl has become the biggest sports event of any kind annually in the U.S., it is
MLB’s World Series that was the big annual event first and has lasted for well
over a century and counting. Before the
NFL overtook baseball and bowling in the 1980s, it became a national
institution and really still is, even if some people don’t want to admit
that. We have covered several of the
events as issued on home video and two more gems have now arrived from A&E
and MLB including one no one thought we would ever see.
That would
be the legendary 1960 World Series
where the all-time MLB successes, The New York Yankees, took on the Pittsburgh
Pirates. The Yankees were the favorites
and though the Pirates were a really good team, the Yankees have always been
the favorite not unlike the way the Pittsburgh Steelers usually are in football
as the NFL’s most successful franchise.
Both
teams played some great games and the games were exciting, but the Yankees did
not walk away early with the Series.
Instead, the Pirates fought back and tied the series at three games a
piece, so it moved on to Game 7 and that game would be played back at Pittsburgh in the beloved Forbes Field, a locale in the
working class neighborhood of Oakland
that is still beloved to this day long after it was torn down.
The game
was intense, with the Yankees giving it their all. They looked to be winning, then things swung
the way of the Pirates and in one of the most legendary outcomes in all of
sports history, in any sport, a young Bill Mazeroski was up at bat (which he
was not always known for) and hit a spectacular home run that won them the game
and showed why baseball continued to be the American Sport.
So
imagine the fact that no one anywhere had any full record of the series, let
alone any game of it? Insane, shocking,
sad, this became one of the all-time Holy Grails of sports programming. It was considered a lost treasure, but the
MLB and NBC had not record, no fans had no record and this only helped to
further increase its legendary status!
Baseball’s Greatest Games: The
1960 World Series Game 7 now has arrived on DVD as a copy of the final key game has
surfaced. So where did this come
from? With no one having VCRs or digital
anything or Internet anything, how could this priceless program finally have
surfaced? It turns out there was a copy
buried deep in the archives of one of the biggest baseball fans of all time,
though he has been gone for a very long time.
A legendary singer, sometimes actor and more successful TV and Movie
producer who was so fired up about what was happening, he had his personal
videographer record it. His name: Bing
Crosby.
Recently
found because his private archive was being searched for one of his many TV
shows for DVD release found the copies and when this was announced, the shock
was amazing, especially among baseball fans.
It may be in black and white (NBC supposedly broadcast it very limitedly
in color, being owned by TV manufacturer RCA at the time) but it is here and it
really is one of the greatest games ever played, baseball or otherwise.
This
version offers both the original TV audio and an alternate radio audio track
matched up to the footage and it is stunning.
After 50 years of being a missing program, even having the final game is
great and is worth watching both ways and then some. Even new fans will be impressed by the
history that actually happened. Seeing
is believing and I really enjoyed seeing the legendary game turning out to be
as good as it is.
Extras
include vault interviews with three Pirates (Mazerosky, Vern Law & Hal
Smith), five Yankees (Yogi Berra, Johnny Blanchard, Whitey Ford, Bobby
Richardson, Ralph Terry), two newsreels of the results (one from Fox Movietone,
the other from Universal) in black and white, a 3:34 highlights piece in color
and 42:49 film on the whole series with clips from all seven games, also in
color from the official MLB archive and narrated by Bob Prince who hosts the
live TV portion of the main program.
You can
read about the 1979 Pirates World Series
victory at the link for the A&E DVD box set of that game:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3750/The+Pittsburgh+Pirates+1979+World
We also
have the box of the Chicago White Sox
winning the 2005 Series here:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3177/World+Series+2005:+The+Chicago+W
Though
several other box sets have been issued on more recent World Series, we now
look at a third ourselves, the San
Francisco Giants 2010 World Series Collector’s Edition DVD box set. This massive 8-DVD set includes Game 4 and 6
of the National League Championship that led to their entry in the big game, all
five games of the Series that led to their championship and a Bonus DVD that
includes the Giants Clinch NL West Division, NLDS and NLCS Highlights, Parade
& San Francisco Hall Celebration, 2010 Season Walk-Off Wins & Inside
the Park Home Runs, Matt Cain’s One-Hitter, Buster Posey’s First Hit & HR,
Posey’s Hit Streak Reaches 21 Games, Juan Uribe’s Two HRs in One Inning, Brian
Wilson’s Shows & Beard and Additional World Series Final Out &
Celebration. The actual game discs have
alternate Multiple Audio Tracks on the games, while the slender cases once
again have statistics on the backs of each of them for each game.
It was
great to seem them smash the Texas Rangers.
The 1.33
X 1 image on 1960 is a black and
white film copy of the black and white video of the game, while the anamorphically
enhanced 1.78 X 1 image across the 2010
DVDs can be a little pasty and detail challenged despite having good color from
their HD tradedown origins. We have seen
MLB on Blu-ray and know this can look better.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on 1960
is rough on the TV audio and even a little more compressed on the AM radio
track with Prince, but they sound as good as can be expected for their age and
that they even still exist. The Dolby
Digital 2.0 Stereo on 2010 can range
from good audio on the TV audio to slightly weaker audio from the radio tracks.
All in
all, both sets are terrific and very collectible, even beyond what is meant for
fans.
- Nicholas Sheffo
