Seriously though – Pittsburgh is such an awesome sports town..   (via http://www.sportspickle.com)

The series went a full seven games.  In the seventh game, at the bottom of the 9th inning, with a count of one ball and no strikes, Bill Mazeroski, the Pirates’ second baseman, smashed a drive over the left field wall, ending the game and crowning the Pirates as World Champions. Mazeroski became the first player to hit a game winning home run in the seventh game, to win a World Series.

Fast forward 33 years later, when Canadian fans will remember Joe Carter would becoming the only other player to end the World Series with a home run, doing so for the Toronto Blue Jays in the 1993 World Series.

No known recording of the entire Game 7 was known to exist, until the discovery of a recording of the telecast of Game 7 was discovered in a wine cellar in Bing Crosby’s home in Hillsborough, California in late 2009.

Crosby was a part-owner of the Pirates, and was apparently too superstitious to watch the game live.   He arranged for a company to record the game (no doubt an expensive venture at the time), and chose to listen to the game on shortwave radio from Paris, where he was vacationing. The recording was eventually found by Robert Bader, vice president of marketing and production for Bing Crosby Enterprises.

Game 7 has since been transferred to DVD, and is now available for purchase from Amazon.com, among other retailers.

I still have a few hundred hockey games to catalogue and add to the system, in fact I only have about 5% of my hockey games listed. However, my very small NFL, CFL and MLB collection is completely identified.Many of these recordings are original, unedited broadcasts, including commercial breaks, intermission features, and pre and post-game interviews. Look to the “Orig?” field below to identify such broadcasts.

Part of my cataloguing process is to write descriptions for each broadcast, which is contained in the database. I’m just pondering how to present this data on the site. I will probably end up having seperate “detail” pages for each item. The search engines should like that, no doubt.

My recordings are not for sale, however I am interested in trades. My wish list includes:

• Any hockey (regular season or playoffs) from the 50s through the early 90s
• BC Lions (regular season, or playoffs)
• MLB and NFL games with historical significance (regular season or playoffs)

If you would like to propose a deal, please contact me.

The new page required a number of modifications to the “Unnamed” WP Theme, including the PHP code it uses to render CSS on the fly. And the Classic Sports Tapes collection page itself is essentially a custom WP template that contains WP function/API calls as well as my own database logic. It took a bit of research, and of course some trial and error, but everything seems to be co-existing fine so far.

Oh yeah, there’s a customized back-end admin system too, and I will talk about that in a future post.

The first period ended with the home team being down 1-0.

At 1:45 of the second period, Vancouver’s Doug Smith drew a holding penalty on a somewhat questionable call. The Canucks Brian Bozek and Rich Sutter flew down the ice on a shorthanded 2 on 1 and came very close to tying the game. The Canucks were dominating play, despite being shorthanded.

Then veteran Harold Snespts retrieved the puck behind Kirk McLean and passed it up the left hand side of the ice to a streaking Trevor Linden. Trevor split the defense and scored an amazing goal that thrusted the Coliseum Fans into a frenzy:

Host: Steve Armitage / Color: John Garrett / Play-by-Play: Bob Cole

By the middle of the 1988-89 season, the Vancouver Canucks found themselves struggling and only maintained hope of a playoff spot due to an unexpectedly poor season by the Winnipeg Jets.

However, a club-record seven-game winning streak in February would change everything.

The team would delight the hometown fans in the late stages of the season, putting together a 12-game home unbeaten streak. The Canucks finished with 74 points, and went on to secure a playoff position on March 23. They were to face the NHL’s number one team in the regular season, the Calgary Flames, whom everybody expected to be settled in five games or less.

Game 1: In the first game, the Canucks’ Paul Reinhart, an ex-Flame, sought revenge by sending a wrist shot through traffic over Mike Vernon’s left shoulder to break a tie late in the third period. The Canucks had won 4-3 and struck first blood in the series.

Games 2 and 3: The Flames showed everybody how they managed 117 points during the regular season, dominating the Canucks in all facets of the game in scoring 5-2 and 4-0 victories.

Game 4: The Vancouver Canucks bothered and pestered the talented Flames into taking bad penalties, resulting in four power-play goals and a shocking 5-0 lead, which chased Vernon from the game. The Canucks hung on for a 5-3 win and tied the series.

Game 5: The overworked Canucks were no match for the depth of the Flames in game five. The Calgarians cruised to another 4-0 win.

This sets the stage for Game 6, which took place on April 13, 1989. Here’s the Hockey Night in Canada intro: