{"id":3967,"date":"2019-09-16T14:47:08","date_gmt":"2019-09-16T21:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/?p=3967"},"modified":"2019-09-16T14:47:08","modified_gmt":"2019-09-16T21:47:08","slug":"1977-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/1977-2\/","title":{"rendered":"1977"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>1977 was not just the year I turned 10.<\/p>\n<p>Or the year <em>Star Wars<\/em> first premiered.<\/p>\n<p>Or even the year I got Baron Karza for my birthday (he was in his box on the kitchen table when I came downstairs for breakfast).<\/p>\n<p>1977 was the first year that I seriously started to pay attention to baseball.<\/p>\n<p>I considered myself a baseball fan since I was 4-5 years old, because on weekends we seemed to live at the ballpark, especially if there was a Sunday doubleheader.\u00a0 I never paid attention to the games as much as my parents and my brother did back then.\u00a0 I was more interested in when the next time the food vendors would come by our section (General Admission 28).<\/p>\n<p>But two things happened in 1977 that changed the way I saw baseball.<\/p>\n<p>The first was the premiere of &#8220;This Week In Baseball&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2xO49ASYURc\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Aside from the occasional Giants game, and that day in 1974 when we saw Hank Aaron break the all time-home run record, I&#8217;d never seen anything like TWiB, a weekly recap show of baseball, much like the older &#8220;NFL Game of the Week&#8221; show that would come on in the afternoon on Saturday, after cartoons.<\/p>\n<p>TWiB introduced stars of the game who I was not familiar with, since we only ever saw the Giants on TV.\u00a0 And the dulcet tones of Mel Allen&#8217;s voice made the recaps somewhat exciting.<\/p>\n<p>How about that?<\/p>\n<p>The other thing that happened in 1977 was Chris Speier being traded away from the Giants to the Expos.<\/p>\n<p>Speier was my favorite player on the Giants since my first exposure to baseball, which started my &#8216;root for the Giants player with your first name and last initial&#8217; thing.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if I ever rooted for Tim Foli.\u00a0 I simply couldn&#8217;t, because he took the place of my boyhood idol.<\/p>\n<p>I think I ended up picking either Johnnie Lemaster (another shortstop) or Jack Clark or Bill Madlock or John Montefusco as my new favorite Giants player, mostly because they had cool sounding names.<\/p>\n<p>Years later Speier came back to the Giants, just in time to watch them become a contender in the late 1980s.\u00a0 By then my ongoing love for baseball had become a permanent thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>1977 was not just the year I turned 10. Or the year Star Wars first premiered. Or even the year I got Baron Karza for my birthday (he was in his box on the kitchen table when I came downstairs for breakfast). 1977 was the first year that I seriously started to pay attention to &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/1977-2\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;1977&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,20],"tags":[58,105],"class_list":["post-3967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-sports","tag-baseball","tag-san-francisco-giants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3967"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3968,"href":"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3967\/revisions\/3968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saguisag.com\/blogv4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}