If you’re a baseball fan, this is a “must read.”
No American sport has a past as deep and cherished as baseball’s. But precious little of the sport’s history is preserved in moving images. Much occurred before the television age, leaving only grainy, scattershot clips culled from newsreels and home movies — and rarely does it show a player of [Babe] Ruth’s stature.
The newly arrived Ruth film is part of the video collection of Major League Baseball Productions, the league’s official archivist, which spans more than 100 years and includes about 150,000 hours of moving images. Most of the collection is stored in plastic cases that line metal shelves of a room labeled “Major League Baseball Film and Video Archive.” The overflow rests in storage a few miles away, in Fort Lee, N.J.
The article goes on describe how Frank Caputo, manager of the MLB Network video library film archive and Joe Porciello research a newly discovered 8-millimeter clip (it was found by a New Hanpshire man in his grandfathers home movie collection).
Source: The New York Times
