The Southpaw

The New Record (Rangers' 30 Runs) and the Old (Boston and Chicago, 29 Runs)

No doubt you've heard by now that the Rangers set a modern major league record last night by scoring 30 runs in a game, defeating the Orioles, 30-3. Here's the box score, in the style most contemporary fans will view it.

Texas broke the old major league record, which was shared by two teams. On June 8, 1950, the Red Sox beat the St. Louis Browns, 29-4. Below is what most fans saw in the next day's paper.

About five years later, the White Sox drubbed the A's, 29-6. The original, newspaper-style box is below.

Yeah, I know that you can find the old box scores over at Retrosheet, which is terrific, but sometimes it's cool to see the originals. At least I think so.

Roger Angell Speaks to History; Sparky Lyle Speaks to Fran Healy

Two posts for the price of one today. I had planned to write about how ferociously MLB, in a bizarre attempt to squash free viral marketing of the game, is pulling videos of even short and relatively trivial action from sites like Google Video and YouTube, but I'll save that for another day. Although it hurts.

Somehow or other, I missed last week's publication of Roger Angell's excellent short piece on the new all-time career home runs record set by Barry Bonds. Thank you, the New Yorker, for continuing to improve your Web site, making archival material available and relatively easy to find.

As usual, Angell, in "Deathly Numbers," provides a unique and elegantly-written perspective on things; you may think differently about the "sacrosanct" mark after reading it. I do.

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On an entirely different note, those who are either watching "The Bronx is Burning" or reading the book (or both, which I recommend), may find the conversation below, between 1977 Yankees Fran Healy and Sparky Lyle, of interest. It's interspersed with some vintage footage of the type we're seeing in the miniseries. At one point Lyle says, "I think a lot of us didn't understand Reggie," but unfortunately he doesn't explain further in this clip (perhaps he does elsewhere), and seems to indicate that they understood Reggie just fine -- but probably shouldn't have cared so much about what he said about them -- and himself.

Hank Aaron No. 715: One Awesome Moment, Three Classic Calls

On April 8, 1974, Henry Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hit his 715h career home run, eclipsing the mark of 714 set by Babe Ruth.

Three broadcasts, which you'll hear if you click on the link below, exist of that moment. The first is Curt Gowdy on NBC TV; the second is Milo Hamilton on the Braves radio network; and the third is Vin Scully on the Dodgers radio network. This is how they called the moment.