1978

Happy new year!

Comments flow ...

1977

Here are my updated NFL77 power rankings going into Week 2 action:

1. Steelers 244

2. Patriots 235

3. Cowboys 231

4. Colts 225

5. Bears 222

6. Raiders 221

7. Broncos 217

8. Rams 214

9. Vikings 208

T10. 49ers 204

T10. Bengals 204

12. Dolphins 187

13. Chargers 186

14. Browns 175

15. Washington 173

T16. Chiefs 170

T16. Oilers 170

18. Giants 166

19. Cardinals 163

20. Lions 155

21. Packers 148

22. Eagles 143

23. Saints 133

24. Bills 128

25. Falcons 126

26. Jets 116

27. Seahawks 115

28. Buccaneers 99 

I've been pretending all week that I've been traveling from Atlanta, where I watched the Falcons shock the Rams last Sunday, to Dallas, to see the 1-0 Giants at the 1-0 Cowboys this ...

I really hope I get checked in before 7.

1977

With Week 1 set to start Sunday, here are my NFL77 rankings as of this moment on Friday, Sept. 16, 1977:

1. Colts 247

2. Rams 233

T3. Patriots 232

T3. Steelers 232

T5. Bengals 203

T5. 49ers 203

7. Vikings 202

8. Raiders 201

9. Broncos 196

10. Bears 195

11. Cowboys 194

12. Chargers 185

13. Washington 173

14. Cardinals 168

15. Dolphins 167

16. Browns 155

17. Chiefs 152

18. Lions 150

T19. Oilers 149

T19. Giants 149

21. Bills 136

22. Saints 136

23. Seahawks 131

24. Eagles 130

25. Jets 126

26. Packers 125

27. Falcons 114

28. Buccaneers 96

Turning to baseball, the American League rallied from Jim Palmer’s start a couple of months ago but came up short:

NL 401 000 020 7-9-1

AL 000 002 102 5-8-0

WP: Don Sutton (1-0) 

LP: Palmer (0-1)

Home runs: Steve Garvey, Greg Luzinski and Joe Morgan (National); George Scott (American)

In other news, the 1977-78 TV season is now underway, and Betty White's new program is cute:

It's incredible how much 1977 is available to revisit in 2024. I am an astronaut. Comments flow ...

1977

Let's let Mel Allen get us all jazzed up for the All-Star Game ...

Actually, I won't see it tonight--(rich) 1977 me is going to the Nina Simone show. But I won't miss a play because, fortunately, Santa Claus brought me one of these for Christmas last year ...

10 Dec 1976, Fri The Paducah Sun (Paducah, Kentucky) Newspapers.com

Comments flow ...

1977

Thank you, GoHeath, for the tip to the YouTube link for what is purported to be the first-ever episode of This Week In Baseball.

I’ve been excited about the debut of this show since there was a report on it in the March 13, 1977, edition of the Paducah Sun-Democrat “Channel Selector” pullout. Here’s Dan Lewis writing for the United Feature Syndicate:

At the recent National Association of Television Program Executives convention in Miami Beach, Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs great immortalized this year as the newest elected member to Baseball’s Hall of Fame, was on prominent display, letting people know about “This Week in Baseball.”

At the hotel pool, in major league baseball’s suite and at banquets, Banks moved around easily, letting the local program executives know that the commissioner’s office, the owners, an assortment of production companies, a distributor and an ad agency were partners in the TV venture …

Banks, who has remained wit the Chicago Cubs—the only team he ever played for during his major league career—in sales promotion, did his job well. The programmers were anxious to meet him and, in return, listened to his pitch on behalf of baseball.

Mel Allen, the one-time New York Yankees’ play-by-play announcer (for 23 years), will host the series, which will run for 26 weeks, starting April 16—the second of the season.

Pro football highlights are aired weekly by both NBC and CBS during the season on their respective Sunday sports specials that precede games on these networks. But although NBC carries a Saturday game and ABC the Monday night game in baseball, neither offers these highlights.

So the league is packaging its own show. These highlights, culled from the 100 to 150 games each week, will be edited by high-speed equipment and will be ready for airing by Friday. In many areas, it is expected they will be shown on the weekend, probably preceding local major league telecasts. In major league cities, channels that air the local teams will have first option.

It appears there were production delays, because Howard Smith of the Associated Press reports in a syndicated column turning up in papers June 23 and around then that the series is in its fourth week:

... and the reception has been great. In Boston, baseball writers can’t see it Saturday afternoons as a rule because they’re at the Red Sox game so they have requested a special showing. Club officials also are planning to show it on the scoreboard at Fenway Park prior to Saturday games.

The idea of a highlight show is not new. The National Football League has been doing it for years with success. But the NFL only has 14 games every weekend to deal with. There approximately are 70 baseball games every week and, until this year, it has not been economically feasible to produce a highlights show.

This year baseball has purchased a video cassette recorder for each ballpark. Of the 70 games played in a week, generally about 52 of them are televised somewhere. Baseball records the telecasts on the cassettes, ships the film to New York and the highlights are put together for the show. It sounds much easier than it is.

I think it sounds hard. And I'm excited to watch—right before I listen to tonight's A's game, at Detroit.

31 May 1977, Tue The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California) Newspapers.com

1977

The stories are all over NFL beat reporting on this date in 1977 is that the Seahawks are considering multiple trade offers for the No. 2 choice in the college draft, which begins Tuesday, May 3. That Southern Cal running back Ricky Bell is going No. 1 overall to the Buccaneers and his old Trojans coach, John McKay, is merely a sidebar.

The target of the possible Seattle suitors, probably, is Tony Dorsett,. That he is the Heisman Trophy-winning running back likely leaves him out of the plan in Seattle, as the Seahawks reportedly want to continue to build their new team around defense. They passed on Cal's Chuck Muncie last year to take Notre Dame defensive tackle Steve Niehaus in their first-ever draft, and even the Pitt superstar does not appear to have disuaded Jack Patera, the head coach and a former defensive assistant with the Vikings, from his plan. Anyway, the disinterest is apparently mutual, as Dorsett’s agent says the Seahawks are too cheap and Seattle is too small for his big star. 

The Seahawks’ general manager, John Thompson, has said that it would take a good first-round choice, a good young player or two or additional choices to acquire the rights to drafting second overall tomorrow. 

That appears to have left out the Giants and Jets, who apparently were both interested but haven't spare active talent to entice Seattle. The widespread belief is that both Dorsett and the Jets hope he's still available in their No. 4 slot.

Also apparently on the outside looking in are the Steelers, whose rumored offer to land the hometown stud was defensive tackle Ernie Holmes, who’ll be 29 at the start of NFL77, plus Pittsburgh’s own first choice, No. 21. That apparently isn't enough for Seattle.

And it appears another of the interested but unlikely Dorsett teams is the defending Super Bowl-champion Raiders, despite a tremendous rumored offer of Gene Upshaw (32), Jack Tatum (28), Neal Colzie (23) and a first-round choice. Alas, the blockbuster never was on the table, Thompson told New York Times columnist Dave Anderson.

Thompson has said he ultimately received about a half-dozen concrete offers, about two or three of which actually interested him. And the day before the draft, we appear to be down to the Cowboys as the focus of speculation. with linebacker Randy White (24), defensive lineman Ed “Too Tall” Jones (26) and/or offensive lineman Burton Lawless (23) figuring prominently in talk of projected trades.

26 Apr 1977, Tue The Buffalo News (Buffalo, New York) Newspapers.com

01 May 1977, Sun The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts) Newspapers.com

But, seriously, who cares? How could anyone get any too interested in a football human-resources event during an active baseball season? The Mets are at the Dodgers tonight.

NHL Update/Oh, Canada

We recently vacationed in Montreal and Quebec City, and, wow, that was fun! 

One reason that my family is pretty good at traveling together is that, once it gets dark, each of the three of us pretty much just wants to get back to a clean hotel room, drink a free cup of coffee, flip on a TV, catch up on messages and explore various YouTube larks. So we typically throw something up on big room TV that we are kind of in and out on, because mostly we are all doing our own things on our laptops. It's usually a pretty happy scene.

I always make the point that it used to be such an adventure when traveling to discover what was being televised in a different market (i.e., "Hey, they're getting My Three Sons and Hazel in the afternoons in Ruston!") but that now you get pretty much the same stuff everywhere but more channels of it. By the time I'm about midway through this sermon, the women, who've heard it probably 45 times over the last 15 years, have usually found the Golden Girls marathon on whichever of those junior-varsity cable networks that roll those every night. Golden Girls is good. It's not good enough for us to binge through the series at home in the way we have great Cosby Show, Gilmore Girls, Good Place, Modern Family, currently Brooklyn Nine-Nine, etc. But it's good--and even excellent for this particular type of in-and-out-with-it application.

On this Canada trip, however, we actually did more local programming just to feel exotic and fancy. Some of it even was in French! None of us speaks French, but the daughter Duolingo-ed her way in advance of the trip to being a pretty good interpreter for my wife and me. We watched some public-broadcasting stuff on First Nations people (I knew pretty much zero about any of that), and we looked some at a Canadian sitcom, Corner Gas. We watched a little curling.

We watched a lot of hockey. My daughter has never much gotten into sports other than rollerskating, but, if she happens to go to college way up north with a bunch of other liberal girls who dig boygenius, I could see her getting into intramural hockey at some rich school with a rink in its student-rec center. She's a pretty big and strong kid, and she likes the speed and the violence. 

I was shocked to discover that the Montreal Canadiens had missed the playoffs the last couple of seasons because it still feels to me that Guy Lafleur and the garçons hoist the ol' Stanley Cup every other year or so. But the daughter deciphered enough of the French pregame April 2 to decipher that our newly beloved Habs were almost certainly soon to be eliminated from contention either that night or one of the next couple of games.

It looked bad early on that Tuesday evening as the Florida Panthers took 1-0 and then 2-1 leads at Centre Bell, about a two-kilometer walk from our Springhill Suites in Old Montreal. But then our main man from London (Ontario), Nick Suzuki, ripped the Panthers for two second-period goals, and the Canadiens never looked back, prevailing 5-3 (or 3-5 as the homies say).

Maybe the Montreal miracle was starting right here, right now! Over the next couple of days, I enjoyed consuming Wikipedia's unsurprisingly super "History of the Montreal Canadiens" page, and, on a trip uptown to see Olympic Stadium and pretend I was a sportswriter in to cover the start of the Expos' season in MLB77, I was thrilled to discover Aréna Maurice-Richard, which is where Sugar Ray Leonard, Leon Spinks and all of those other great U.S. boxers won their medals at XXI Olympic Summer Games, Montreal 1976, and one of the places where Speed Skating Canada trains their great athletes today.

 

Totally juiced by the whole experience, I became almost convinced that our Habs would be climbing out of the Atlantic Division cellar and into the playoffs to chase their 25th Stanley Cup championship in their 108th National Hockey League season. But by Thursday night, both the Canadians and we had ditched Montreal amid the city's biggest snowfall of the year--them down to Tampa and us up to Quebec City. The Canadiens were rocked by the Lightning, 7-4, on April 4 and eliminated from postseason contention; we, on the other hand, had a fantastic time.

So now the Stanley Cup playoffs are underway, and I'm back in the USA rooting for my usual favorites, the Washington Capitals (because they were red, white and blue on the first Topps hockey cards I bought after Innsbruck 1976), the Carolina Hurricanes (because of our happy days in the Triangle) and the Nashville Predators (because of I-24). (The Athletic says the Hurricanes have a chance!) Thank you, Wikipedia, for this bracket.

I guess I'm also kind of rooting for the Toronto Maple Leafs (because of John Candy).

1977

I got a book for Christmas23, just a bit late for my observance of MLB76.

I probably checked out this book from the Paducah Public Library 20 times when I was growing up, and I don't know that I actually ever read a word. I'm sure I did read the stuff about the A's and a paragraph here and there, but what I remember looking at over and over and over again were three things: the logos, ...

... the pictures and diagrams of the stadiums, ...

... and, of course, the baseball cards.

The cards are from the 1975 Topps set, and, even by the time this book came out in 1976, there were, of course, hiccups in terms of which teams the different players were now on. That bothered me even then, and now I think I would've replaced the 1975s with cards of from seasons in which the players had landmark seasons for that team. So, for example, in the case of the Padres, I might've replaced the '75 Willie McCovey, Dave Winfield and Johnny Grubb with 1970 Clarence Gaston (for his team-record-going-into-1976 .318 batting average that season), 1971 Clay Kirby (231 strikeouts) and 1972 Nate Colbert (111 runs batted in).

Yes, Wise Guy, I am aware that's actually a '72 Gaston, '70 Kirby and '70 Kellogg's Colbert. I didn't start collecting until 1975, so my collections are spotty before then. I'm not trying to pull a fast one on you.

Oh, by the way, I'd keep the 1975 Randy Jones, because he won a team-record 20 games that season. Or, if the Prentice-Hall publishing deadline would've allowed, I'd slip in his 1976 card, for the season he got 22 wins and broke his own team record.

Yes, this is a good plan.

But why all the Padres? Because I'm going to use this book to accompany me through MLB77 at the HP, at least when the stadium pictures and diagrams still line up with what the teams are using in 1977, and today 1977's YouTube game that I'm working to is Cincinnati and San Diego. Jones, in fact, is pitching for the Padres. 

16 Apr 1977, Sat The Cincinnati Post (Cincinnati, Ohio) Newspapers.com

Randy Jones was a really big deal in 1977--made one of the Street and Smith's covers and was the National League All-Star pitcher in the Topps set that year.

Somebody should really alert Randy Jones that he's getting so much love at the HP today. Oh, my gosh, he's on Twitter!

Just a note from your Neighborly Lefthander... The next time a team knocks down Fernando Tatis with a inside fastball and our pitcher doesn’t knock somebody on there ass, I’m going ballistic. I’m tired of this shit. Respect...
He deserves it.

— Randy Jones (@RJBBQ35) September 21, 2020