Lately, I've been watching lots of baseball games from the past, including World Series and All-Star games and old Royals games. A couple of days ago, Youtube.com suggested this game for me, a Monday Night Baseball game from August 30, 1976, Royals at Orioles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3EExiBeEqA
. This was the year that Reggie played with the Orioles. He got booed at home during the game (see around 2:22 or so...in that same half-inning, future Royals manager Tony Muser gets an at bat). 1976 was also the year of the Royals first division title and the interesting
batting title race and controversy between McRae, Brett, and Carew that went down to the last game of the year. I hadn't realized it, but McRae was batting .355 in late August that year.
Anyway, at about 2:16:40 into this game, there is a very interesting interaction that I had never heard about. Frank White is about to start his at bat, but he shows his bat to umpire Joe Brinkman. Then he exchanges the bat for a new one. I thought that White realized that the bat was cracked and he wanted to show it to the umpire to explain why he needed to trade his bat, but the announcers--Bob Gibson and Warner Wolf- pointed out that there was too much pine-tar on the bat and that Brinkman wanted White to switch the bat because of it. Then they referred to an incident the year before when Munson had a hit disqualified because of pine tar. Brinkman was one of the umps during the George Brett pine-tar game, 7 years later.
Isn't that something!?
Here's a blog post I found that talks about some of the pine tar games that preceded the famous one with Brett...
https://tht.fangraphs.com/the-pine-tar-games/ That blog post doesn't mention this particular game. I don't know if I have ever seen anyone mention it, in fact.
Some of my fellow old-time Royals fans would probably find it interesting, though!