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Related Pieces
Piece Description
This commentary, never before broadcast, is about the re-creation of baseball games by radio broadcasters in the pre-television days of the 1940s when I was a kid. No one can possibly have seen on TV or even in person games more exciting than those described by the highly imaginative radio guys who broadcast from their studios rather than the ballpark, relying on pitch-by-pitch summaries relayed to them by telegraph operators at the parks-- and especially relying on their imagination.
Transcript
Another season of televised baseball is here. But, you know, it’s not nearly as exciting as baseball was on the radio in the 1940s when I was a kid, back before TV.
We’d sit squirmingin my living room , pounding our baseball gloves, staring with great anticipation at the tall radio that stood in a corner. Suddenly there’d be the muffled sound of a crowd roaring, and we’d jump up as a homely, compelling voice shouted out to us.
“It’s going … going … it’s gone! Right through aunt maggie’s window! A home run! A homer!”
That was Jack Macdonald, the radio voice of the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. He was a highly inventive broadcaster who billed himself as “the Old Walnut Farmer.”
Macdonald was at his best when the Seals were playing outside San Francisco, in Hollywood, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle and the other Coast League cities of the time.
Like ever...
Read the full transcript
Timing and Cues
Intro: Commentator Dick Meister says baseball is best seen on the radio.
Outro: Dick Meister is a veteran San Francisco journalist.
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Emon Hassan
Posted on May 20, 2005 at 08:36 PM | Permalink
Review of Radio Baseball That Never Was
Listening to baseball commentary over the radio as a child, Dick Meister remembers how commentators like Jack McDonald was able to take listeners to the field by employing SFX and imaginative use of words.