Farewell, Tony Kubek, Ralph Kiner, Marilyn Dykstra, etc.
Well, friends, it was great fun while it lasted, but at least we'll always have that one, glorious late-March week in which our dusty, baby boomer memory banks were jump-started back to life.
Say it ain't so, Bud!
MLB and YouTube have nixed the trove of TV baseball video that loyal reader/commenter John Philips has been posting since last week.
I will give MLB a call to follow up on some of the issues John raised in his announcement of the sad news, but I'm assuming it won't change the bottom line.
No more George Kell, Curt Gowdy, Joe Feliciano, Ed Kranepool, Lindsey Nelson, etc., etc.
Click below to read John's official word.
Well, to quote Mick Jagger and Keith Richards "It's all over now." I have just received this notification from You Tube:
This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by MLB Advanced Media claiming that this material is infringing on their copyright.
My interpretation of the law differs from MLB's but I don't have an army of litigators at my disposal to dispute their claims. Plus I like my house and don't wish Bud Selig and company to place a lien against it and / or my pension. I guess it's a lot easier for them to push me around than the Player's Union.
Thank you to the dozens of you that thanked me for posting these videos. I was truly astounded at the feedback I received. It was fun sharing these with people that truly appreciated them. In a perfect world, not only would Major League Baseball have saved more of this material, it would also make it more available to the fans that want to view it. But no, MLB couldn't have been bothered to save the videotapes of many of these games or protect the ones they did save from deterioration. Nor can their Baseball's Best website be bothered to post any thing more than a tiny fraction of the materials they do have.
So now my video collection goes back into hiding (from my wife, not MLB - she thinks I'm insane and would love to shred my DVD's if given the chance) and I return to anonymity. To all of you on Kranepool Forum and the other sites that linked my videos, thank you.
And to Neil, thank you for the opportunity to demonstrate to my wife that I am not the only "lunatic" who's interested in watching a videotape of a game "that you already know the outcome of."
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Comments (4)
Marshall McLuhan is rolling in his grave.
Thank God we have people out there protecting us from our own foibles.
Of late, because of John's work, I have been mindlessly driving around my town listening to the Bee-Gee's and Abba on a rebuilt 8-track, in search of a Pergament's, (only to windup in a K-Mart), in order to find some plaid bell-bottoms, wide neck silk shirts, and barber shops that use spaghetti bowls as molding devices.
I guess it's back to scouring the shelves of the local GNC Store in search of the untraceable derivatives of HGH.
Maybe MLB should do the right thing now and ask John Phillips to allow them access to his personal tapes so that they can fill in gaps in the video histories and then allow real baseball fans to see these things that infringe on their copyrights? Of course they should allow a small fee to pass to Phillips for this right as well, since he thought these tapes were historic to preserve and baseball couldn't be bothered.
I think it the was the first of those videos posted here, but I said it wouldn't be too long before MLB got YouTube to deleted the videos.
MLB and the NFL and the are notorious on getting user-submitted highlights and game film deleted from YouTube.
They do own the copyrights to those videos, so they can do what they want, but should they show some lightheartedness in allowing people to view old footage? That's anyone's opinion.
It's Crane Pool Forum - and it's a long story ...