Thursday, March 26, is Opening Day, and the season kicks off with a contest between the Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Mets at Citi Field in Queens. The game will be televised nationally on NBC, the first game of its freshly signed contract with Major League Baseball. For many in my age group (I’ll be 68 in April), NBC is synonymous with baseball. In my youth, other than the handful of games televised by our local teams, NBC’s Game of the Week was our only window to the game, particularly the stars of the “other” league. For me, growing up in a National League city, the other league was the American League, and the weekly games on Saturday afternoons and, sometimes, Monday evenings, were my only glimpse at stars like Rod Carew, Al Kaline, Mickey Mantle, and Carl Yastrzemski. They let me follow how Dick Allen and Wilbur Wood led the 1972 Chicago White Sox resurgence and how the quirky Detroit Tigers pitcher Mark Fidrych emerged as a national celebrity in 1976.
NBC began airing the Game of the Week in 1957 and added Monday Night Baseball in 1972. Beginning with my awareness of baseball, NBC’s roster of talent included, at various times, Curt Gowdy, Jim Simpson, Bob Costas, and Vin Scully on play-by-play, Tony Kubek, Sandy Koufax, Maury Wills, and Tom Seaver as analysts, and Joe Garagiola doing a bit of each. By 1976, NBC was no longer airing Monday Night Baseball and shared the national baseball contract with ABC, whose baseball coverage never measured up to NBC’s. The final Game of the Week aired on NBC in 1989.
NBC returned to baseball coverage sporadically from 1994 to 2023, which, strangely, I have no memory of. With this article, I recall seven regular-season games from NBC’s heyday. It’s not intended to be a rundown of the greatest or most significant games NBC ever televised. It’s just a few that stand out in the ever-declining regions of my faulty memory.
“You Gonna Put a TV in There?”
July 1, 1972: Tigers 2, Baltimore Orioles 0 at Tiger Stadium, Detroit. I’m cheating with this first entry. I didn’t actually watch this game live. While it was airing, I was at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, watching the Pittsburgh Pirates beat Fergie Jenkins and the Chicago Cubs, 4-3, thanks to two home runs by Roberto Clemente. However, the first seven innings of this contest are available in black and white. I bought them on a VHS tape a few years ago and watched it again recently. I knew televised games were different from how they are today, but the many discrepancies were striking.
Gowdy and Kubek are on hand, clad in wide-lapeled jackets and wide neckties, instantly transporting the viewer back to the 1970s. The telecast begins with a contrived pregame discussion between managers Earl Weaver of Baltimore and Billy Martin of Detroit. Martin opines that the Orioles handed the Tigers the AL East Division title when they traded Frank Robinson in the offseason. Weaver counters that he’ll be watching the World Series from his dugout. Martin cracks, “You gonna put a TV in there?”
The fast-paced pitching duel between Detroit’s Mickey Lolich and Baltimore’s Dave McNally breezes along. Looking at the starting lineups is like seeing my old baseball cards come to life, except that Tigers first baseman Paul Jata, starting in place of Norm Cash, seems an intruder. The announcers allow for some dead air. Instead of yakking endlessly, Kubek speaks only when he has something to say; otherwise, he’s silent. There are no fancy graphics. Replays are in slow motion and are used sparingly, only on close plays. There are no disruptive in-game interviews. At one point, the announcers speak with groundbreaking Detroit-based female reporter Jackie Lapin. She mentions that she had coffee with McNally and found him very nice. The action resumes, and Lapin is abruptly cut off, never to be heard from for the remainder of the telecast. Whatever nuggets of baseball wisdom McNally related on their coffee date, and whether he takes cream and sugar, are lost to history.
Gowdy steps aside and lets Kubek describe the action in the sixth inning. When he introduces him as “Mr. K,” Kubek remarks, “That’s what I was as a player.” Later, Gowdy tells the audience that Baltimore reliever Doyle Alexander is “throwing up in the bullpen.” (Somebody get that man some Pepto Bismol!) The great Kaline hits a solo home run in the sixth inning. The Tigers’ second run came across in the eighth inning and is absent from the video.
The Big Hondo Strikes
August 6, 1973: Tigers 5, New York Yankees 4 at Tiger Stadium. The Tigers had won the 1972 East Division title before succumbing to the eventual World Series Oakland Athletics in the AL Championship Series. In 1973, the Tigers were trying to squeeze one more championship out of an aging roster. They were a half-game out of first place when they welcomed the New York Yankees of their mediocre “Horace Clarke Era” on Monday Night Baseball. The Yankees looked like they had a comfortable 4-1 lead heading into the bottom of the ninth inning.
Against Yankees starter Mel Stottlemyre, Mickey Stanley led off with a double, and one out later, advanced to third base on a single by Willie Horton. Yankees manager Ralph Houk called on his left-handed relief ace Sparky Lyle, while Martin countered with two veteran right-handed pinch-hitters. The first, Kaline, forced Horton at second, scoring Stanley. Up next was Frank Howard.
“Big Hondo” Howard cut an imposing figure at six-foot-seven, 255 pounds. The bat looked like a Little League bat in his hands, and on deck, he swung it like a madman with one thing on his mind: home run. Lyle appeared to have Howard fooled, out in front of a curveball. Howard connected with an off-balance, one-handed swing and powered the pitch over the left field wall to tie the game. The Tigers won in the 10th when Aurelio Rodriguez led off with a single and scored on consecutive throwing errors by Lyle and right fielder Felipe Alou on Ed Brinkman’s sacrifice bunt. But it was the home run by Howard, seldom seen on national TV while he spent most of his career toiling for a lowly Washington Senators team, that stood out.
Hammerin’ Hank Passes the Babe
April 8, 1974: Atlanta Braves 7, Los Angeles Dodgers 4 at Atlanta Stadium, Atlanta. On this evening, the Braves’ Henry Aaron connected off Dodgers pitcher Al Downing to hit career home run No. 715, in the fourth inning with a man on base, passing Babe Ruth and breaking what was thought to be an unbreakable record. Gowdy on the call: “There’s a long drive! Ball’s hit deep! He’s – and it’s gone! He did it! He did it!” With no 24-hour sports channels at the time, had Aaron not coincidentally broken the record on Monday Night Baseball, the nation wouldn’t have seen the milestone live. The rest of the game was anticlimactic. Who remembers anything that happened after the fourth inning? Certainly not me.
“A Monkey Handling a Football”
September 29, 1979: Cubs 7, Pirates 6 at Three Rivers Stadium.
Entering the season’s next-to-last game, the NL East-leading Pirates (97-63) held a one-game lead in the loss column over the hard-charging Montreal Expos (94-64). In winning, the Cubs guaranteed that the race in the East would go down to the last day of the season.
The back-and-forth game went into the 13th inning tied at 6-6. Mick Kelleher started the top of the inning with a single off Pirates reliever Don Robinson. Cubs rookie reliever Bill Caudill, who entered the game with a 0-7 record, bunted Kelleher to second. Jerry Martin then hit a grounder to third baseman Bill Madlock. Madlock fired the ball to first for the second out, but as Kelleher took off for third, first baseman Willie Stargell sent the ball sailing over Madlock’s head, allowing Kelleher to score the winning run on the error. “I looked like a monkey handling a football on that one,” Stargell told Dan Donovan of The Pittsburgh Press.
The Pirates got a couple of men on two outs in the bottom of the 13th, but Caudill struck out Stargell to end the game. It was Caudill’s first major league win. “All I threw were fastballs, inside and outside,” said Caudill. It was also the only major league appearance for Pittsburgh’s Gary Hargis, who entered the game as a pinch-runner in the 13th.
A No-Hitter on National TV
April 7, 1984: Tigers 4, White Sox 0 at Comiskey Park, Chicago. One doesn’t tune into a baseball game expecting to see a no-hitter, but anyone who switched on the Game of the Week on this afternoon saw the Tigers’ Jack Morris turn that very trick. How much luck was involved? “A lot,” Morris told Combined News Services. “I’ve had better stuff before, but any time you throw a no-hitter or even a shutout, you have to have luck.”
The only time Morris was in trouble was in the fourth inning, when he walked the bases loaded with no outs. But the big right-hander got Greg Luzinski to hit into a pitcher-to-home-to-first double play and struck Ron Kittle out to end the threat. In the seventh inning, Tigers manager Sparky Anderson inserted Dave Bergman at first base. Bergman made Anderson look like a genius with two sparkling defensive plays in the seventh and ninth to preserve the no-hitter.
As Morris delivered the final pitch to Kittle, the NBC broadcasters were silent, letting the moment take over. When Kittle struck out trying to check his swing on a big curveball, Garagiola simply said, “Got him swingin’ and he’s got his no-hitter!” They went quiet again as Morris was mobbed by his teammates.
“The Sandberg Game”
June 23, 1984: Cubs 12, St. Louis Cardinals 11 at Wrigley Field, Chicago. Nobody who endured this nearly four-hour, 11-inning marathon will ever forget it. The two teams combined for 27 hits, but nobody was better on this day than Cubs second baseman Ryne Sandberg. All he did was go 5-for-6 with two home runs and seven RBI. His RBI single off Neil Allen capped off a five-run, sixth-inning rally that brought the Cubs to within one run at 9-8. He led off the bottom of the ninth with a game-tying home run off Cardinals relief ace Bruce Sutter. After the Cardinals scored two in the top of the 10th inning, Sandberg tied it again with another homer off Sutter, this time with two outs and a runner on base. The Cubs won the game in the 11th on an RBI pinch-hit single from Dave Owen. Despite Owen’s heroics, this game came to be forever known as “the Sandberg Game.”
David Conquers a Goliath Named David
April 25, 1987: Cleveland 2, Yankees 1 at Cleveland Stadium, Cleveland. This game between two non-contenders is memorable to me only for the classic David-and-Goliath moment that ended it. With Cleveland ahead, 2-1, in the top of the ninth, New York’s Wayne Tolleson hit a one-out single off starter Scott Bailes. Cleveland manager Pat Corrales signaled for Frank Wills, a rather nondescript right-hander, who entered the season with a 5.40 ERA and five saves over parts of four seasons.
Making his first appearance of the season, Wills struck out Rickey Henderson and walked the bases full for future Hall-of-Famer Dave Winfield. His fastball having failed him, Wills went to his slider against Winfield. “I’ve always had the breaking stuff, but last year they were concerned with me falling behind batters and being too fine,” he told John Bergener of The Blade. “They tried to make me like [teammate] Ernie Camacho and throw only fastballs.” Doing it his way worked this time. Wills got Winfield to swing through two sliders to earn the save. It turned out to be his final one in the major leagues.
On TV
From 2026-28, NBC will replace ESPN as the host for Sunday Night Baseball, while also broadcasting MLB Sunday Leadoff and the Wild Card games. Some games will be on NBC Sports and Peacock. As the saying goes, check your local listings.
Tigers broadcaster Jason Benetti will be the lead play-by-play announcer. Analysts will be drawn from whichever teams are playing in any given game, reminiscent of a time when NBC used local announcers for the World Series. Costas returns to NBC as the Sunday Night Baseball studio host. Will NBC do away with the distracting fancy graphics, in-game interviews, and the endless jabbering between the two analysts, and just let us enjoy the game? It’s probably too unrealistic an expectation.
