1986 World Series - Game 6; bottom of the 10th...

[davepeck]

...reenacted via Nintendo\'s RBI Baseball:

http://www.sandiegoserenade.com/2006/04/1986_world_series_game_6_reena.html

Lastowka explains wildly popular Series video
Peter Schrager / FOXSports.com
Posted: 6 hours ago         
   
A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from my buddy Tanny that included the words "The Greatest Thing Ever" in the subject line.

Tossing around something like "Greatest Thing Ever" as a title to an e-mail is a pretty big deal. With that comes a ton of expectation. Tanny\'s credibility as both a friend and a liaison between my world and all things great were now officially on the line.

His e-mail didn\'t disappoint.

Inside the electronic postal gift was a link to this video clip that will both confound and amaze. It contains a seven minute video of the final moments one of the most famous baseball games ever played on Nintendo\'s RBI Baseball.

With the actual Vin Scully game audio in the background, the genius behind the San Diego Serenade blog re-enacted every strike, every hit, every wild pitch to the bottom half of the tenth inning of the 1986 World Series Game 6. Mookie\'s wave home, Ray Knight\'s celebration, Buckner\'s error — they\'re as incredible (or heartbreaking) to watch through the lens of RBI Baseball as they are on ESPN Classic.

Within minutes of Tanny\'s e-mail, I received a few other messages from Wednesday Buffet readers with the same link. The RBI Baseball video was spreading like the NBA\'s headband craze. By the end of the hour, Will Leitch at Deadspin had posted the video on his blog, and it became the most re-watched thing on the Internet since the Rick Solomon/Paris Hilton sex romp. More baseball fans were talking about the RBI Baseball clip than Chris Shelton\'s fast start, R.A. Dickey\'s venture into knuckleballdom, and Barry Bonds\' recent legal issues combined.

I watched it over and over and over again.

And that\'s really the magic of this video clip. It never gets old. It\'s like Pulp Fiction. You can watch the clip 10 times, and pick up something new to appreciate during every view. McNamara\'s trip to the mound, Scully\'s call, the wild pitch — it\'s all in there. I spoke with Conor Lastowka, the man behind the brilliant Internet clip, over Easter weekend.

Peter Schrager: How the heck did you do this? Techincally, it\'s a wonder to imagine. Did you play both controllers, and direct each at bat? Or was this cut and edited?

Conor Lastowka: Well, working this out took a great deal of effort. I thought about waiting to record the video until my friend Geoff arrived in from out of town to record, but I decided to do it on my own. Pretty much the way I did it was to use a Nintendo Emulator on my computer, and to use my computer keyboard to play out both of the teams (Using the arrow keyboard, plus the IJKL keys to control both of the teams). This proved insanely difficult at first, but like a lot of things, once I got used to controlling both teams at the same time, it got a bit easier.

However, things like the Keith Hernandez fly to Dave Henderson in centerfield took at least 200 at bats to get right, because even when I ended up hitting the ball to the right spot, I had to switch my hands on the keyboard and make the outfielder actually catch the ball.

It probably took about four hours to capture all the footage. If I screwed something up, I could reset the emulator to a point where I had saved it. So, I pretty much would save my game as the pitcher was about to release the ball, and then if it didn\'t\' go where it was supposed to, would hit a button and restart from where I had saved it. Once it was all done, though, I realized that some of it was inaccurate. A Ray Knight foul ball that Scully describes as "a slow roller down the left filed line" looked more like a bunt foul, so that had to be redone. And Mookie hit a foul ball to the left that should have been to the right, so I had to go back and capture that with the emulator.

Schrager: Why 1986 Game 6? Do you have any personal connection to the game?

Lastowka: The 1986 World Series is a contest that took place while I was 5 years old. I had no idea that it was occurring when it actually happened. I started collecting baseball cards in 1988, so any previous history of the game that happened before that year was completely overlooked by yours truly. My roommates — Derek, Greg and Richard — and I lived about a mile off campus at the University of Virginia.

We happened to watch the rebroadcast of the 1986 World Series Game 6 about 3 times in 24 hours. None of us had ever seen it before, but it happened to be during the phases of all our lives where the activities that we chose to participate in made everything seem far more dramatic and exciting than they would have been normally, so this game really stuck out in my mind. It\'s such an amazing, incredible, improbable game that you can\'t help but acknowledge its place in the pantheon of sports history.

Schrager: How long did it take to put this together?

Lastowka: Like I said before, it probably took about four hours to record the RBI footage, and about six hours to edit it together. While I was putting it together, I was supposed to go to a Padres game with my friends Adam and Jake. Once I got involved with recording and editing the footage, I knew I was on to something good, and i actually hoped that the Padres game would be rained out.

But no dice.

People seem to argue that I had no life, or that I wasted a bunch of time making the video. But, in retrospect, the fact that over 250,000 people have watched the video — at what point where would you say I didn\'t waste my time? Sure, if 50 people had seen a video that I invested 10 hours in, that would be waste of time.

But I got a job from the video; my blog sandiegoserenade.com got people writing to it to talk about bands in San Diego, nationalhighfiveday.com got thousands upon thousands of visitors, and even my Google ad sense account got a couple of dollars out of it. So yeah, I think that the ten hours I spent on the video were well worth the payoff of the whole video.

And seriously, this was something I did in between hanging out on the beach and on the balconies of the local bars. This wasn\'t \'I\'m hanging in my parents\' basement\' kind of thing.

Schrager: What can we expect next? An NBA Live 98 version of Michael Jordan\'s last shot vs the Jazz? A Madden 99 version of the Rams-Titans Super Bowl last drive? Or are you strictly an RBI Baseball for NES guy?

Lastowka: What is next is an interesting question. I don\'t imagine I\'ll be doing anything similar to this any time soon. The 1986 Series and RBI Baseball seemed to be the perfect combination. I don\'t really think I want to make another video with footage from an early NES game set to a famous announcer\'s call. I definitely think that someone will use this format, old Nintendo game, plus classic announcing footage to reenact a game. But I\'m not trying to establish a brand or a product. I just wanted to win the $25,000 from the "youtube cybersmack" contest, and since it wasn\'t going to work out, I will move on.

Anyone that comes out with a classic sports announcer call, like "The Play" or "The Drive" or Kirk Gibson\'s home run, set to any sort of video game footage, is just really a pathletic individual. Seriously, it\'s like The Vines following in the footsteps of The White Stripes or The Strokes. Leave the good Internet viral videos to the RBI 1986 Series and to the leprechauns in Mobile, Ala.

And all of those new video games —NBA Live, Madden — they don\'t have the same sort of ridiculous charm as RBI. They look way too realistic. Watching those Fisher Price-style men reenact historical sports moments is way cooler than watching perfectly accurate Madden polygon players reenact the Titans-Rams final (Super Bowl) drive.

Schrager: How does it feel to be the man behind the most popular thing on the Internet last week?

Lastowka: Having everyone link to my site was definitely intense. I told my friend Derek that if I had known that tens of thousands of people were actually going to read my stuff, I would have taken a bit more time to make sure that it was coherent, or non-offensive. But as it was, I think it worked out great. I got a job out of the whole deal. "National High Five Day" got a good deal of promotion, my comic Permanent Tanooki hopefully got a dozen more readers than it normally would have.

Once I finished the RBI video, I absolutely knew that people on the Internet were going to like it. It was just the kind of thing where you were sure that people would pick up on it. Of course, you can never predict stuff like 250,000 people watching your video, but you\'d always like to think that stuff like that could happen. I\'m just happy that it\'s something that old friends of mine that I haven\'t talked to in years could get in touch with me about, that my parents could send out e-mails to all their friends that they could be happy about, and that I could just sort of kick back for a whole weekend and be like: \'Yeah, for this brief period in time; I am the man.\'

Although at the bar I went to this afternoon, I saw a dude in a backwards Red Sox hat, and I asked him if he had seen the RBI re-enactment of the 1986 series, Game 6.

He said "No, absolutely not."

That was disappointing, but whatever.

I just hope the Jerry Seinfeld ends up seeing it some day. He\'s a big Mets fan.

That would pretty much be all I need to just pack it in right there.

A man, a dream, and a blog — Conor Lastowka\'s become an overnight Internet success. For now, he can "sort of kick back for a whole weekend and be like: yeah ... for this brief period in time, I am the man."

Mets and Red Sox fans alike have gravitated to the link.

No surprise here.

Tanny\'s endorsement was right on. You\'d be hard pressed finding any arguments to his e-mail subject. Conor\'s video is more than creative, entertaining, and unique — it\'s the greatest thing ever.

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/5512862

[crimsonknuckles]

that is great, to bad the ball didn\'t go through the first baseman. my parents had a huge party that night i was 10 yrs. old. drunk people + crazy game = confused kid. great game and great recreation. i loved rbi baseball. lets see some more...... how about any of the islanders 4 almost 5 straight stanley cups!!!!!!

[kindm's]

As a red sox fan I don\'t ever want to see that footage agian regardless of the medium presented.

I remember being with some of of my best friends at the time watching that game and having my heart ripped from my body. It isn\'t as big a deal now seeing as the red sox have 1 the series. But in 1986 it was another mile stone in the "curse"

1 of my best friends was a mets fan. He was sooooo bummed out watching that game UNTIL. this infamous inning. I never heard the end of it until I graduated HS. Itw as also thrown in the face of red sox fans.

Hell Buckner had to move out of New England because of all the death threats he got.

[Drew_Kingsley]

Thus affirming the facts that people like to forget:

1. The pitchers are far more responsible for the loss than Bill Buckner.
2. The Red Sox would NOT have won if Buckner made that out... it would have gone to an 11th inning.

Also of note is the fact that the Red Sox also had a lead to blow in Game 7.

But I digress.  I want to pretend that the guy who made this doesn\'t have WAAAYYY too much free time.  Awesome stuff.

[zero]

for the sheer heartbreak this caused new englanders everywhere, you know the game had to be made by a new yorker...but on the bright side in the 80s boston had another professional sports team with a man by the name of bird

[ChrisPitch]

Excellent points Drew. The main reason the Red Sox lost that Series was because they had no answer in the bullpen to match the Mets\' 1-2 punch of Jesse Orosco and Roger McDowell. That\'s why they blew leads in Games 6 and 7. They also didn\'t have much starting pitching other than Clemens and Bruce Hurst.

Also, let\'s not forget that Buckner should not have even been in the 10th inning of Game 6. Boston had a backup first baseman--Dave Stapleton--who typically came in for defensive purposes late in games. However, Sox skipper John McNamara left his aging, hobbled starter in there and we know what happened.

Two interesting things about the legendary error after having watched that game and inning several times: 1. Buckner doesn\'t bobble it. He\'s simply too slow in bending down and is unable to get the glove on the ground, which simply reinforces the fact that Stapleton should have been in, and, 2. Even if Buckner cleanly fields it, there\'s no doubt that Mookie beats him to first base, which would have brought up Howard Johnson with runners at the corners. We can only wonder what would have happened.

Oh well. Too bad. Let\'s Go Mets!

[kindm's]

I didnt forget the tghings that led to the collapse of the red sox in that series. However, the personal let down as well as having a Mets fan shove it down my throat for several years afterward keeps me from ever wanting to relive that game.


On the opposite end of the spectrum, I still get choked up watching the 1980 Mens Olympic Hockey win against the USSR. I love watching those replays.

People forget that there was another game after that, but the big win was against the Soviet Union.

[Wolfman]

People forget that there was another game after that, but the big win was against the Soviet Union.

Interesting paralell you bring up.  The whole Buckner game was only game 6.  The Mets still had to win a game 7 after that to win the championship.  But you never, ever hear about game 7. The USA-Russia game was a semi-final.  The USA still had to beat Finland for the gold but you never, ever hear about the gold medal game.  

This whole RBI thing is ironic for me because I busted out RBI Baseball this past weekend for the first time in about 6 years.  Great game.

Watching...this is hilarious...whoa!  Schiraldi throwing 96MPH?!?!?!

Miller Lite player of the game: Marty Barret = rotfl rotfl rotfl

...Done!  Brillinat video!  Bravo!

Now someone needs to re-enact Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS on MLB2K5!!

[Me!]

painful to watch even with nintendo graphics, I still hope it\'ll end differently no matter how much I know better

[davepeck]

Interesting paralell you bring up.  The whole Buckner game was only game 6.  The Mets still had to win a game 7 after that to win the championship.  But you never, ever hear about game 7.

a game 7 which the sox also had a 3-0 lead in, just as they did in game 7 of the 1975 world series..

[Wolfman]

Interesting paralell you bring up.  The whole Buckner game was only game 6.  The Mets still had to win a game 7 after that to win the championship.  But you never, ever hear about game 7.

a game 7 which the sox also had a 3-0 lead in, just as they did in game 7 of the 1975 world series..

Now someone just needs to re-enact game 4 of the 2004 ALCS.  Or game 5.  Or game 6.  Or game 7.  Doesn\'t really matter, actually.

[Me!]

:lol:  I love it.....

[FrankZappa]

Interesting paralell you bring up.  The whole Buckner game was only game 6.  The Mets still had to win a game 7 after that to win the championship.  But you never, ever hear about game 7.

a game 7 which the sox also had a 3-0 lead in, just as they did in game 7 of the 1975 world series..

Now someone just needs to re-enact game 4 of the 2004 ALCS.  Or game 5.  Or game 6.  Or game 7.  Doesn\'t really matter, actually.

don\'t mess with wolf!