Video Gems: Roberto Clemente, Home Run Derby and Lost Media

Perhaps the greatest catch Roberto Clemente ever made never appeared on TV. Streaming gives us access to everything today, but how can we preserve it?

This edition of Video Gems is less about the headline clip — Roberto Clemente’s legendary fielding of a potentially pivot hit and throw to home in Game 6 of the 1971 World Series — than a play Clemente made in the same season that doesn’t live anywhere but the memory of those who witnessed it. Bruce Markusen’s book The Team That Changed Baseball, an examination of that ’71 Pirates team, details another play the iconic Clemente made in an otherwise inconsequential June series against the Houston Astros.

Writes Markusen:

“[Clemente] crashed hard into the wall, sending a shockwave through the crowd, and slumped to the ground, but the ball remained in his glove. Although Clemente had just deprived the Astros of a tie-breaking two-run homer, at the conclusion of the play, 16,307 fans in attendance at the Astrodome…rewarded Clemente, an enemy player, with a standing ovation. He paid a price, however, with a badly bruised left ankle, a gashed left knee, and a swollen left elbow.

In an interview with Sports Illustrated, Astros manager Harry Walker, who had played in the majors for 11 years and had managed Clemented from 1965 to 1967, simply said of this catch, “It was the best I’d ever seen.”

Likewise, scribes fortunate enough to cover the mid-June contest deemed it the greatest catch ever at the Astrodome, as one headline from the following day reads.

Meanwhile, the reporters, Astros and Pirates players and coaches, and the 16,000-plus watching in the Astrodome are the only people who have ever seen it.

Pittsburgh’s win over Houston that day did not air on television.

The concept of an unaired sporting event today, much less a Major League Baseball game, seems incomprehensible.

To wit, I found myself marveling at the power of present-day technology as in the morning hours at my day job, I streamed the radio call of the San Diego Padres 3-0 win over the Washington Nationals on July 25. The beginning of my lunch break coincided with the start of the eighth inning, at which time I used my phone to watch Dylan Cease throw just the second no-hitter in Padres history.

This level of accessible is truly remarkable, and has helped me restart a love affair with baseball that waned not long ago. The contrast with an era in which one of the reported greatest catches ever wasn’t even caught on film is fascinating.

Actually, we don’t even have to view it through the lens of the 2020s: My introduction to MLB was through WGN airing just about every Chicago Cubs game throughout my childhood summers in the ‘90s.  

In the same era during which Harry Caray’s couple-Budweisers-deep renditions of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” provided a soundtrack of my summer, I discovered an appreciation for various programs from the 1960s. Stumbling upon the campy Adam West-helmed Batman, The Addams Family and The Munsters, each became favorites of my youth.

I also tuned into daytime reruns of Home Run Derby, which in hindsight probably contributed to my childhood baseball fandom as much as WGN broadcasts of the Cubs. The performance level on Home Run Derby was certainly much more predictable than the up-and-down Cubs of the ‘90s.

For the uninitiated, Home Run Derby was a 1960 TV series that was part competition, part interview show. It featured the era’s most prolific MLB hitters in, as the name implies, a home-run contest. However, the show predates the All-Star Weekend event and was filmed during the offseason.

Willie Mays’ passing this spring brought me back to watching the show when I was about eight years old. It introduced me to Mays, Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle and Cubs legend Ernie Banks.

The Society for American Baseball Research has an interesting retrospective on Home Run Derby that’s worth your time. The series is a true product of its product that would almost assuredly never even get off the ground in this age, making its existence at the time all the more worthy of remembering today.

After watching HBO’s terrific documentary, Say Hey, Willie Mays, I decided to seek out those old episodes of Home Run Derby. I discovered them on YouTube, and I am indeed a fan of discovering old media on YouTube. But for some reason, this time, I felt an urge to seek out the physical copy.

I have an increasingly contentious relationship with streaming and digital vs. physical media. Streaming has, in so many ways, been revelatory for sports fans. I write this as the Paris Olympics are happening, and the ability to pull up a live broadcast of any event makes the experience all the more magical. In much the same way that I credit accessibility through streaming for rekindling my love for baseball, the Paris Olympics have been the most fun I have had following the Games since the 2008 Beijing Games.

At the same time, I lament what the decline of traditional media consumption and physical media mean for the future. I have always preferred physical books to Kindle for practical reasons; my eyes simply fare better with print. I also fully appreciate the irony of me revealing that in a digital newsletter, but I digress.

However, my dedication to printed books is increasingly tied into the same sentiment as a renewed interest in things like DVDs: The existence of a book you can hold and your ability to tune into a series that you have on a disc isn’t behold to the whim of some executive deciding server costs need to be slashed.

The aforementioned Willie Mays documentary, as an HBO product, lives on the Max streaming service. But not all HBO Sports documentaries are available on Max: Two of my favorites, The Runnin’ Rebels of UNLV on Jerry Tarkanian’s controversial basketball squads and Rebels of Oakland on the 1970s Raiders and Athletics teams, live on YouTube thanks to the efforts of some good Samaritan.

In that same vein, I wanted to watch the 2012 documentary The Other Dream Team to get prepped for the Olympic Games. Google says the film, covering the 1992 Lithuanian basketball team, is on Amazon Prime.

Great! Except…

And it makes me wonder, what will become of the content produced exclusively in the streaming age — content never converted into tape or disc, accounts never committed to newsprint like the above referenced reportage of Roberto Clemente’s untelevised catch — when its existence hinges on the whims of suits?

And, to that end, how do we catalog the breathtaking moments we witness now thanks to advancements in technology to avoid them becoming lost media in the future?