Never-Before-Seen Color Footage Of 1965 Baseball Is Incredibly Cool

This is an absolute treat for baseball fans and television history buffs. It's the last three innings of Reds pitcher Jim Maloney's 10-inning no-hitter on Aug. 19, 1965 at Wrigley Field.

Bleed Cubbie Blue uncovered this 48-year-old WGN broadcast, which covers the eighth inning on and includes commercials (which might very well be the best part). Here's hall-of-fame broadcaster Jack Brickhouse, playing an old-timey bartender in an ad for Hamm's beer, which hasn't been an independent brewery since 1968.

According to Al Yellon at BCB, the very fact that this footage exists, let alone is of a no-hitter, is amazing enough. He says it's likely the earliest surviving color videotape of a baseball game, and among the oldest color videotape recordings period. And the quality is so good!

Naturally, WGN's technical capabilities bear little resemblance to today's broadcasts.

You can see that WGN-TV was using just four cameras in that era. There were two cameras behind the plate (one at field level, one in the upper deck), another in the upper deck behind third base, and the center-field shot. Still, they were able to cover the action quite well. There were none of what we consider staples of today's telecasts: crowd shots or closeups of players before the action, and virtually no graphics, not even a score graphic. The score was shown by a shot of the scoreboard at the end of each half-inning.

Maloney was a pretty darn good right-hander for the Reds for 10 years, but injuries forced him out of baseball just as Cincinnati was putting together the Big Red Machine dynasty. This was actually his second game in that 1965 season where he threw nine no-hit innings—on June 14 against the Mets, he lost his no-no and the game on a leadoff home run from Johnny Lewis in the 11th.

This game looked like it might be more of the same, until Leo Cardenas homered off Chicago's Larry Jackson in the top of the 10th. (It's at the 45:25 mark of the video above.)

Maloney was far from spotless on the day: he walked 10, including the leadoff batter in the bottom of the tenth. But he erased the baserunner and closed out the game by getting Ernie Banks to ground into a 6-4-3 double-play. (58:15 in the video.) And then, the celebration, which looks a lot like a no-hitter in any era.

[ Bleed Cubbie Blue]

H/t Rick