The Pecan Park Eagle

Monte Irvin on Fidel Castro’s Failed Tryout: “If we had known he wanted to be a dictator, we would have kept him around and made him an umpire.”

Larry Dierker: “Did I ever have any pitchers who fought to stay in games when I went out there and asked for the ball? Nope. Those guys were all gone by the time I became a manager.”

“Not sure what it is, Monte. When you have a guy like Dave Raymond moderating a thing like this, it just seems to liven things up!:

Forgive my liberal translation above of what was being said by the participants in these stills from the DVD movie of Tuesday night’s SABR-sponsored Monte Irvin-Larry Dierker panel discussion on baseball history that many of us attended at Minute Maid Park on 12/09/09.  I simply wanted to use the photos to show all of you who couldn’t be with us some examples of the joyful moments you missed. I also want to let you know that we are lucky to have what we have in the digital movie.

Our plans for a professional coverage of the panel discussion fell apart at the very last moment. We didn’t even have a digital movie camera to do the job ourselves. Late in the afternoon, Bob Dorrill of SABR and I had just about given up on the matter as another lost opportunity to get get the 90-year old Hall of Famer Mone Irvin and Houston Colt .45s/Astros icon Larry Dierker on video record of wht promised to be a landmark evening,

Then we got lucky. I recently bought a new full 100 HD Sony Cybershot hand camera for doing still photo work. It came with its own rechargeable battery, a moviemaker option, and a capacity for capturing as many photos as the user could posssibly load onto a memory stick. Not really knowing if I would ever need it, I went overkill on the memory stick, purchasing one that could hold 16 gigs of recorded visual material. I wasn’t thinking about doing movies, nor had I ever used the moviemaking function until this past Tuesday night.

Man! Am I ever happy with the way this little camera saved the day for us!

I started out, sitting on the front row, to record as much as I could get before the battery went dead, I’m thinking I may be lucky to get 15 to 30 minutes, but was that ever selling this thing short. The panel lasted about two hours and I got the whole thing on digital copy, with adequate sound from the little mike within the camera. I had the power and the storage space by chance to capture the whole thing, a fact I only learned for certain when my adult son Neal came home and helped me upload the thing onto my computer hard drive. (My computer dependency far exceeds my computer geekiness, unfortunately.)

At any rate, the whole thing took up about 10.3 gigs of the 16 gig memory stick. I’m not a pro, but I think I got a fairly steady picture, along with the isometric exercise of my life. Holding that camera in the air without tripod or wall-lean support for the duration of the show was quite challenging.

I don’t how many DVDs it will take to now transfer this material intact into copies from my computer, but we will figure it out, along with a way to make copies available to those who want them. The Irvin, Raymond, and Dierker families will all get copies, along with copies we will make for our SABR and Cooperstown recorded history libraries. If there is a way to post the tape on our SABR website so that people can watch it from there is another option to be explored. Of course, if someone like our own Greg Lucas wanted to use the material for any kind of report he wanted to do for FOX, we will make the data available to him too.

I’m just thrilled that we were able to save a little bit of history that looked for a while as though it was going to be lost. As things turned out, the evening became one of the greatest moments that many of us have ever experienced with living baseball history. Monte Irvin and Larry Dierker are both one-of-a-kinds. And moderator Dave Raymond did a magnificent job of lighting the matches that started the fire of passionate storytelling. Those of you who weren’t there Tuesday night really missed something special.

Tags: Baseball, History

This entry was posted on December 11, 2009 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.