Royals in the AL Playoffs

There I am (right camera, big hair) before the American League playoffs, waiting to shoot batters from a specially-built, very distant, center-field platform. (We knew there was a game going on because we could hear it on our AM pocket radio.) The photographer for United Press International (our opposition) snapped this; we switched tourist roles and I snapped him next.

Part of a hand-picked team of 9 AP staffers from all over the US, out there they had me use a Canon 800mm lens with a custom-machined mount which attached it to a 5-frame-per-second Nikon body – a very high-tech Frankenstein creation at the time. The “view” down into the batter’s box was still very poor even with the long lens.

If something great happened, like a home run, theoretically I was supposed to have gotten a picture showing the ball ON the guy’s bat as he was hitting it. That meant clicking off one frame for every single pitch, with a swing or not, timing the button press at exactly the right instant so the ball would be over the plate, ideally.

If I did get a decent frame, the film needed to go back to our AP darkroom ASAP for the editors to review it. We were so far out that we needed three relay runners between us and the press box office. The seasoned staff who came in from photo HQ in New York processed B&W film “dry to dry” in about 2 minutes.

Another example of being a dumb kid: I was supposed to wear black out there so we wouldn’t distract the batters, but this first game I forgot and had colored stripes on a white shirt! I thought I’d have to switch in order to stay out there but I guess our platform was far enough from center that it ended up not causing trouble for the batters. We were all told not to move around anyway.