Archive for category Rare Baseball Videos

Vintage clip of Candiotti in action with Blue Jays

Here’s a cool video of Tom Candiotti with Toronto in 1991:

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Short Video Clip of Candiotti facing the Giants in 1997

Here’s a short clip of Tom Candiotti pitching in 1997, on the Saturday Fox Game of the Week. In that game, Candiotti blanked the Giants through the first seven innings of the Dodgers’ 11-0 victory.

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Vintage Tom Candiotti interview from 1988

Here’s a vintage video of a Tom Candiotti interview. Candiotti, then with the Indians, discuses his pitching style the day following a 3-1 win over the Brewers on May 10, 1988.

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If only they’d scored more runs….

On this day, September 17, in history, 24 years ago, the Colorado Rockies set an attendance record and also pounded Dodgers knuckleballer Tom Candiotti in the process.

In that September 17, 1993 game, Colorado ripped Candiotti for seven runs–all earned–in just 1.2 innings. Candiotti’s ERA went from 2.58 to 2.88, and his shot at the NL ERA title was essentially done.

Not many people remember this, but going into September, his ERA was 2.43, which lead the major leagues. The Dodgers that year, however, averaged 2.81 runs of support in his starts, according to Baseball-Reference.com, so he was only 8-10 on the year.

Interestingly, though, teammate Kevin Gross was 13-13–despite an ERA of 4.14. How did he manage 13 wins? Well, according to Baseball Reference, the Dodgers gave him an average of 5.22 runs of support in his starts.

Imagine being on the same team but getting completely different kinds of run support!

If the Dodgers had scored five runs in each of Candiotti’s starts in 1993–the same number of runs they averaged for Gross–he could have gone 24-7. He finished with a 3.12 ERA, seventh-best in the NL.

Hey, 24-7 wouldn’t have been a stretch. That same year, the Giants’ John Burkett was 22-7 with a 3.65 ERA. Tom Glavine was 22-6 with a 3.20 ERA. Consider that from May 1 to August 25, Candiotti had a 1.85 ERA in 22 starts–that’s a lot of games he should have won. Instead, he was just 8-2 with 12 no-decisions.

candiotti 93 stats

Anyway, here’s a video of him striking out the Phillies’ Mariano Duncan from April of that season.

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Candiotti interview with Seamheads.com & retro Hough video

Yes, we’re almost a month into the 2016 season and this is only the first post of the new campaign here on A Life of Knuckleballs! (I guess our coverage here is just like “The Baseball Network” way back when – haha.) Yes, we know that Steven Wright of the Red Sox has surprised quite a few people with his strong start to the season – albeit with a losing record of 1-2 despite his 1.40 ERA – and it’s no surprise to me personally that R.A. Dickey continues to struggle, but the first post of the year deals with a couple of knuckleball pitchers from the 1980s and 1990s.

And yes, I realize that it was 21 years ago this week that the Red Sox signed Tim Wakefield. But c’mon, he gets a lot of press – and has gotten plenty of accolades over the years – so I’ll take a pass on that one other than to mention this piece of history in one line.

What we’re going to do instead here in this first post is post an interview that Seamheads.com, which covers the Red Sox, did with Tom Candiotti this week. As mentioned near the end of the hour (after Candiotti left), the guys noted the ex-Indian and Dodger knuckleballer averaged only one wild pitch per 30 innings for his career – great control for a knuckleball pitcher.

And we pay tribute today too to Charlie Hough as he pitched the first game in Marlins history and beat Orel Hershiser and the Dodgers back in 1993:

We’ll post more stuff throughout the season, so catch up with you later!

 

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