Oct 24 2013 02:37 PM
Grantland tells the oral history of the 1989 World Series. Mostly it's a story of the day of the quake and the time following. Good footage and quotes from many of the principle and peripheral characters. You got your Sandy Alderson. You want Tim McCarver, you got him. Mackey Shillstone? No joke, we've got Mackey Shillstone quotes. Unfortunately no Rickey Henderson. But seriously... Mackey Shillstone!
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/985 ... al-history
And that's just the Met figures. Aside from ballplayers, you've got journalists, family members, fans from the upper and lower decks, Dan Quayle, Ted Koppel, Larry F. Gatlin. Tim McCarver and Gatlin's brother both claimed to have had ominous cases of nausea that they imply may have predicted the quake. Willie Mays, says a third-hand source (Thirty-Something's Timothy Busfield!), had a premonition brought on by the weather.
Nice intermediate side story is the A's retreating to their Arizona Spring Training complex to work out and play intrasquad games, and everybody, it turns out, HATES... not Canseco, not Rickey, but Eckersley. Eck ends up plunking Jose during an intrasquad game in the middle of the World Series and everybody takes Canseco's side.
A weird thing you see in the middle part of this video that's straight out of an Irwin Allen disaster movie is the players' first instinct is to use their field privileges to get their wives (and kids, I think, in some cases) down on the field to give them the meaningful but hardly foolproof protection against the building going down on them. The wives, expecting to get the cameras turned on them in the stands when their hubs come to bat, are glammed out like they've likely never been in their lives, looking like they're posing for the cover of Vogue, but in the midst of a disaster rather than a World Series game. It's surreal.
[youtube]jjShDPY2nBs[/youtube]
Fuck this earthquake boochit. This kid came to see a ballgame.
