Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for May 30, 2023

HEY! That’s what made This Week In Baseball must viewing! Plus, it had cool music.

there was always summer reruns!

[Dana Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man character] That’s the way it was and we LIKED it!

There was the VCR, as long as the authorities didn’t find out.

Midnight TV was off the air, except those test patterns. Weekends was Wolfman Jack on the radio, and I was there, man!

We didn’t even HAVE a (working) TV in our house until after I went away to university. And my childhood was very good indeed. Who needs TV when you have a backyard skating rink, a two story playhouse, a stile over the fence into a “wild” area several sections in size, and a library pass? We played Sh(u)tes and Ladders, Hearts, Monotony, etc with each other… and my mother played the piano while we sang (and 10¢ when we memorized all the words to a hymn or Broadway song).

JVC released the first VHS machines in the United States in 1977. Steph would’ve already been nine… By the time he was a teenager, video cassettes would’ve been common-place, even in the US…

I never wasted my time watching other people playing games. More fun to participate.

On the plus side, we didn’t have to pay for cable, and then pay extra for ESPN, just to watch the bowl games.

Nor were there dozens of bowl games with teams that didn’t even have a winning record.

O for those days, Gone of long ago…when you had to be right there, If you didn’t wanna miss a bit of the Show…

Luckily, VCRs were a thing by the time I was a teenager, so we didn’t face this predicament often, unless the power went out while a programme was being recorded!

I loved seeing that ski jumper crash every week with his “Agony of Defeat” during ABC’s Wild World of Sports!

And our attention span was stronger.

“It is now 11 o’clock, do you know where your children are” Remember that?!

and why not talk about a 3 hour game for 12 hours before it is played and 16 hours after it is played?

Warner Wolf “Let’s Go To The Video Tape”

I never watched any sports highlights growing up. All I needed for entertainment were my games, the internet and of course, animated shows. Plus, the occasional chapter book.

during Nam, we got AFRTS and NFL, MLB, NBA, etc 16mm films of weekly highlights. we could watch superbowls over and over. war was cool, sometimes. i was the EMFN that got stuck with showing them every night at movie call on the messdecks. poor me!

Glad I never gave a fig about how well or poorly any professional sports team performed. Never could understand why anyone gets so invested in it either.

That’s why he’s still in it…

Now the good stuff is on YouTube, usually within minutes.

I don’t currently follow any sports. But just the other day I did look for a YouTube clip of highlights from game 7 of the 2016 World Series.

VHS tapes…have a bunch…lol

Not so much highlights, but I remember watching the Monday Night Football broadcast when Joe Theismann got his leg snapped. They replayed that gruesome scene over and over.

The internet can be lousy, but there are times when you NEED to get a complete resume of Lillian Roth’s career right NOW.

but imagine our joy when we see it fifty years later on youtube, after our grandkid shows us how to get online.

It was a good childhood.

We went outside and tried to reenact the highlight. Well, except for the “agony of defeat” skiing tumble.

It was called memory. You could replay it over and over in your mind.

The only problem with this was that when you saw a tape of it, the play was frequently not a good as you remembered.

The good old days

My youngest son once asked me: When you were young, which DVDs did you most like to watch over and over?

Also back when I was a kid people would be in the moment, share i the experiences with those also present and maybe later tell tales about what went on.Now so many forget to enjoy being present and instead are busy snapping pictures or video of what goes on, the result being they could almost just have stayed at home watching what others record – the exception being that it would of course not bring likes on social media.

Reruns are great. Last night I was watching Green Acres and found out Mr. Haney’s first name . Charleton! The actor Joe Conley , Ike Godsey of The Waltons fame , spilled the beans. Charleton – charlatan ! That’s great comedy ! And I didn’t need no stinking internet to find this out.

Me too!

Me too

The “Miracle in Miami” from 2018, when the Dolphins beat the Patriots using a lateral with 7 seconds on the clock. Ticket cost….$200, Hotdog and Coke,,,$20. The look on Tom Brady’s face…..priceless!! Thank goodness for YouTube

He was born in 1968, the year Bob Gibson rewrote the record books for how good a pitcher can be in the MLB.

I wish I could’ve seen that.

On the other hand, we did get to watch the Space Shuttle Challenger explode, over and over and over.

George Michael Sports Machine!

When I was a kid we sometimes watched games on the radio. Mostly we played our own.

Well, thanks to TV ads, the Agony of Defeat ski jumper is burnt into my old screen. The Networked stopped using it after he had his first great grandchild.

Had to wait until the 2000s before you could rewatch it . . . OR record it without the express written permission of the MLB.

I annoys me how the characters shorten “Stephen”. It’s “Steve”, no matter the spelling. “Steph” is short for “Stephanie.”

Okay, rant over.

But I do own a videotape of Super Bowl I.

I would take yesterday over today when it comes to sports. Today we are over-saturated with up to the minute sports and over analyzed everything. Back then it was simple, Monday Night Baseball, Saturday Game of the Week, maybe a couple of games on local television. No ESPN or Fox to over-analyze each game.

TV sports have progressed to the point where the Universe can do without Howard Cosell;who got grumpier and grumpier the older he got

I could climb over our back fence into the school’s playground, right where the swing set stood!

Everyone now is all “Oh no, I can’t use electronics! What Shall I do?” they need to learn to be content without a phone.

Well, you did get to watch the same skier crash over and over by watching ABC’s Wide World of Sports opening.

Don’t listen to rat and pig, Stephan. They are just jaded.

He forgot “Wide World of Sports”.

Sports reporting was better when it was just three or four minutes on the late news delivered by guys in ugly sports coats and uglier toupees. ‘SportsCenter’ and the like took the fun out of that.

That’s right, ya whippersnappers, and we LIKED IT that way!

It sounds like a WONDERFUL childhood!

Hey, Cartoon-Boy! Today, I’m on your side (and I’m considerably older than you, too). —Although I will grant that the ability to pause or replay on my computer can be useful….

What I think about more often is the music. My favorite in high school and college was Neil Young. I can only recall seeing him on the Johnny Cash show once (2 songs) and then on something with CSN&Y. Maybe 10 minutes total video, which I couldn’t save. Now I could go on YouTube and watch him for hours. Of course, there’s probably 10 times more out there of BTS or Harry Styles, but that’s another story.

Don’t forget This Week in Baseball on Saturday.

BA baa, bada bap ba ba, ba BA Bada bap ba!

Thank goodness for youtube…I can rewatch Mantle and Maris playing in their heyday again!

I’m happy with my ’60s and ’70s childhood…we spent much more time outside than in front of a screen.