I love the footage of jubilant Senators fans rushing the field after the extra-innings walk-off single. Thousands of them, from the looks of it. We need more jubilant field-rushing in baseball.
And yeah, that pitching delivery looks really weird to a modern eye. And yet there he is - the SoSH consensus Greatest Pitcher of All Time, calmly delivering sidearm pitches that don't look particularly fierce. He won the MVP that year at age 36, with an AL-leading 5.1 K/9, behind only Dazzy Vance of Brooklyn. Johnson's ERA was 3rd in the majors, behind Vance and also, narrowly, trailing Hugh McQuillan of the Giants - who by coincidence was his opponent in those final few innings of Game 7. So this footage shows us two of the three best pitchers in baseball in 1924, trading zeroes into extra innings, until the HOF legend finally prevails. Pretty sweet.
Boggs26 says the only thing different is helmets and video quality, but I see real changes to batting, pitching, and even defense (to say nothing of the racial diversity, lack of equipment, and seemingly-bizarre field dimensions). It's the same game but played differently. I'd love to watch a game of similar magnitude from that era, start-to-finish, if any such film exists. I wonder what such footage would have cost to make back in those days - might've been prohibitively expensive for anything other than a World Series game.
