It’s been a hard year and we’re still in January.
I’ve been working on some stuff. Researching. Hitting the archives. Looking for lost media. The digital world is an interesting place. The saying was, at one point, “the internet is forever” but now we know linkrot is a plague for the internet as websites shut down. Having a link to a site that doesn’t exist anymore is, aside from a few things like the Wayback Machine, useless.
We’re past the 20th anniversary of the 2004 World Series, but one of the moments I will always remember was from a game on June 13th. The Dodgers were in town. Dave Roberts (still a Dodger, remember) is at the plate. He hits a line drive. Surely extra bases. But no! Pokey Reese leaps into the air to snag the ball out of the sky.
Go look for it. I’ll wait.
ESPN had a game write-up that is now blank.
MLB Film Room? They have just one highlight from 2004 and it’s not that.
But after some extensive searching I struck gold. Practically found footage.
I clipped the frames from the grainy video myself. Apologies for the poor quality of a game someone surely taped and uploaded to a corner of the internet.
And now we have a highlight.
And that was good. I was happy. But there was something more. Something else. Something commemorative for this year.
“It’s like a baby New York” maybe? Already uploaded. Although this too was lost media for a while. I actually wrote to Southwest in the early 2010s asking about the commercial. They have a YouTube channel and it had their latest ads…why not a classic? Anyway, here’s that one.
But I wanted to shoot higher.
As I mentioned in the 2006-2016-2026 article last week, those ‘06 Sox traded for a new centerfielder to replace the departed Johnny Damon. The lucky guy? Coco Crisp. While there was a lot of talk about Jeremy Reed as a “Johnny Damon starter kit,” Coco was established. Francona was ready to unleash his speed in the outfield and on the bases.
Unfortunately an injury put Crisp on the IL just five games into the season. It was a minor disaster on the field.
It was a major disaster in the media relations department! Coco Crisp was a centerpiece of the NESN ad campaign for the season. They’d already shot the film and produced the commercials.
If you were around in 2006 this isn’t a surprise.
And you know what’s coming.
So I give you a treat. NESN’s big ad campaign: One Nation, One Network.
Or as you remember it: Did you see that catch Coco made?
