Belated Game Preview: Game One, 1974 World Series

It has come to the author’s attention that, as part of a recent update and reformat of MLB’s At Bat 12 app, there’s been included a tab (pictured right) that allows users to access and watch any one from 16 different classic baseball games. Most readers will likely find the majority of the games either too old (such that the broadcast technology is borderline prohibitive in terms of “watching”) or, otherwise, so recent that they (i.e. these games) are insufficiently shrouded by the mists of time.

There is, however, a collection of three or four games — starting with Game Five of the Orioles-Mets World Series in 1969 and ending with Game Five of the 1984 NLCS between the Cubs and Padres — that are both (a) available in brilliant Technicolor and (b) old enough that one can experience them again for the first time, as it were.

As a service to the reader, I provide here a belated game preview to one of those games — namely, Game One of the 1974 World Series between the Oakland Athletics and Los Angeles Dodgers. Note that by “game preview,” what I mean is mostly just “the lineups for, including some advanced metrics in an awkwardly formatted table.” And: “an acknowledgment of the broadcast team, which is composed of Curt Gowdy (play-by-play) and Vin Scully (color).” And, finally, one last word: “mustaches.”

Below are the lineups in question. Here are the links the FanGraphs pages for each team: Oakland / Los Angeles. Here’s a link, courtesy Baseball Reference, to the final box score of the game: box. Finally, here’s a link to watch the game on a PC (and not an iPhone or iPad or whatever): watch.

Oakland Athletics

Lineup
Here’s the starting lineup for the Oaklanders:

Pitchers
And here are the pitchers that appear for Oakland in the game:

Los Angeles Dodgers

Lineup
Here’s the starting lineup for the Dodgers:

Pitchers
Here are the pitchers that appear for Los Angeles: