MLB Network is showing the 1970 World Series and it is in black and white? Has the color footage been lost or was it only broadcast in black and white? I know the 1969 Super Bowl was broadcast in color and the World Series was a bigger event in 1970 that the Super Bowl.
The Mets network has shown various games from the 1969 series, and I think one of them is in B&W and the rest in color. It’s probably just a matter of how they got recorded.
All sporting events were broadcast in color by 1969. Use the “I Dream of Jeannie” cutoff (1966) – it was the last show to be broadcast by NBC in B&W (ABC and CBS lagged a bit behind). But all sporting events were broadcast in color by the mid-60s; they were high-prestige, high-rated shows.
It’s possible the color tapes were lost, but the original broadcasts were in color.
The dvd of the 1968 world series is in black and white. I’d like to see it in color. Bob Gibson was amazing.
I caught a (very small) part of that game today, also. There was a side segment about the series that was in color. It showed Sparky Anderson arguing with an umpire during the same game being broadcast. So there must be color footage somewhere.
The tapes that were use for the original broadcast were probably re-used. When you see old sporting events from that era, you are looking at archive tapes which were made at low quality and often in B&W so that the most hours possible could be fit on one tape. Storage space was the problem - if they archived at high quality they would have had no room for all the tapes.