Baseball on the Radio

That ball is - “Slicker than boiled okra" – that's how Red Barber described a baseball that a fielder was unable to get a grip on. The 2015 baseball season is underway! - "Oh Doctor!"

Radio? Who needs a radio? Today with the magic of the iPhone, Android phone, tablet device, computer, or yes an ole’ fashioned radio - fans of the game can once again experience the melodic cadence of baseball. Tune to your favorite local radio station or download MLB.com At Bat® and enjoy your favorite team.

According to the historical records, the first baseball game ever broadcast on radio was over 93 years ago. It was the Pittsburgh Pirates versus Philadelphia Phillies game on August 5, 1921. The game was broadcast by KDKA staff announcer Harold Arlin of Pittsburgh. Sorry Phillies fans, the Pirates defeated the Phillies 8-5 that day.

However, it wasn't until 1933 when Larry MacPhail in partnership with Paul Crosley, the owners of two local radio stations hired a young southern announcer named Red Barber to do play-by-play for the Cincinnati Reds that fans of the game would experience baseball like never before. Red Barber broadcasting for the Brooklyn Dodgers made it an art.

Today you can start the season listening to Red Barber's successor, Vin Scully. Now in his 66th year with the Dodgers! So, as baseball gets underway tune to your favorite radio station and relish the poetry of the game . . .

Excerpt from Ken Burns - Baseball

“It measures just 9 inches in circumference, weighs only about 5 ounces, and is made of cork wound with woolen yarn, covered with two layers of cowhide, and stitched by hand precisely 216 times.

It traveled 60 feet 6 inches from the pitcher’s mound to home - and it can cover that distance at nearly 100 miles an hour. Along the way it can be made to twist, spin, curve, wobble, rise, or fallaway.

The bat is made of turned ash, less than 42 inches long, not more than 2 3/4 inches in diameter. The batter has only a few thousandths of a second to decide to hit the ball. And yet men who fail seven times out of 10 are considered the games greatest heroes.

Baseball is played everywhere: in parks and playgrounds and prison yards, in back alleys and farmer’s fields, by small children and old men, by raw amateurs and millionaire professionals.

It is a leisurely game the demands blinding speed, and the only one in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.

Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years, while they conquered a continent, warred with one another and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights and the meaning of freedom.

At the game's heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game, born in crowded cities; an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included; a profoundly conservative game that sometimes manages to be years ahead of its time.

It is an American odyssey that links sons and daughters to fathers and grandfathers. And it reflects the host of age-old American tensions: between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.

It is a haunted game in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope - and coming home.”

Oh, by the way, during live ball games you will find me tuned to 720 WGN Chicago. It's what I grew up with listened to as a boy - Go Cubbies . . .

References:

Ward, Geoffrey, & Burns, Ken. (1994). Baseball. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

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