1940's Baseball

[johnnydnh]

A book that I recommend is Arnold Hano's "A Day in the Bleachers" It gives detailed account of the author attending a World Series game in 1954 at the Polo Grounds. I can also second LizzieMaine's recommendation of "The Boys of Summer" My mother gave me that book in 1972 after hearing Roger Kahn being interviewed on a local radio talk show. It was the first "serious" book on baseball that I had read. Prior to that I had practically memorized Arnold Hano's "Willie Mays" -a great book written for young readers such as I was. There are so many great books written about baseball though. A few others that come to mind are Red Barber's "The Rhubarb Patch", George Higgin's "The Progress of the Seasons" and Roger Angell's "The Summer Game" All of these books should serve to illustrate the importance of baseball to Americans during the 1940's-1960's. For baseball fiction, I love W.P. Kinsella's "The Iowa Baseball Confederacy" and "Shoeless Joe". No other sport lends itself to great literature like baseball.

[johnnydnh]

Speaking of play-by-play men, as a Giants fan I grew up listening to Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons and later Hank Greenwald. I remember when we would go camping, we could always pick-up Vin Scully at night. I had it good! LizzieMaine is absolutely right about the "yawping gasbags" that pass for play-by-play talent today with their overly-stylized "signature calls" Nothing makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck like listening to the local "calls" from around the league on ESPN or the MLB Channel. Some of the worst offenders: "The A-Bomb from A-Rod!", "The Tex Message", "He-Gone", "Stop It!", "You Have Got to be Kidding Me!" and last but not least, "Mercy!" I'll admit that Russ Hodges "lost it" after Bobby Thomson's home run in 1951, but that was a once-in-a-lifetime watershed moment that he was calling. The modern yawping gasbags "lose it" 4 or 5 times every single game. I sure miss Curt Gowdy and Joe Garagiola and sometimes Tony Kubek, doing the Game-of-The-Week, playoffs and World Series. I have to turn off the sound nowadays during the Fox broadcasts.

[LizzieMaine]

It's interesting to compare Hodges' call of the Thomson homer with Red Barber's description of the same moment:

"Branca pumps, delivers -- a curve -- swung on and belted, deep shot to left field -- it is -- a HOME RUN! And the New York Giants win the National League pennant and the Polo Grounds goes wild!" And then Barber was *silent* for exactly 59 seconds, to let the crowd noise tell the rest of the story.

Modern broadcasters try to make the games and the moments *their* moments. The broadcaster is and should be merely the vehicle thru which the moment is conveyed --- and sometimes they should just get the hell out of the way and let the moment speak for itself.

I cannot watch Fox baseball coverage -- I only force myself to when there's no alternative. They epitomize every possible thing that's wrong with the modern version of the game.

[dhermann1]

That's like Barber's coverage of Mickey Mantle's 23rd home run one year. He says something to the effect that Mickey Mantle is up, he's got 22 home runs on the season. Mantle strokes one, and Barber just says, "23".
And speaking of the classic old time announcers, how about good old PeeWee Reese and Dizzy Dean doing the CBS Game of the Week back in the 60s? It wound up being a Yankee game 3/4 of the time, which suited me just fine. But the combination of Reese's Louisville drawl, and Dean's Arkansas drawl made the whole thing perfect. Old Diz even invented his own word, slud. As in "He slud into third base. Safe!"

[LizzieMaine]

Best Dizzy Dean story ever --

Diz was announcing for the St. Louis Browns in 1947, and for most of the season he'd been ragging on their pitching staff, insisting that he himself, despite having been retired for six years, could at that moment pitch better than any man the Browns had. The Browns players got annoyed by this -- and their wives got even more annoyed, insisting that Dean was insulting their husbands every day on the air -- and finally the team told him to put up or shut up. He agreed to pitch the last game of the season, suited up, and pitched four shutout innings against the White Sox, leaving the game only after he pulled a hamstring running out a base hit. He then went up to the broadcast booth, sat down at the mike, and declared "I said I could do it, and I done it," thus living up to his own dictum, "It ain't braggin' if you can do it."

[johnnydnh]

Great story! The best part is how he hurt himself....running out a base hit.

[Espee]

If I remember right, Barber advised Scully, something on the order of "Don't feel you need to SAY something, unless you're sure you'll improve the silence."

[LizzieMaine]

Getting back to the original question -- why did baseball matter? -- I think the best possible way to truly understand would be to read, in its entirety, the link that I'll give at the end of this post.

The story of the link is this -- the night of the final game of the 2004 American League playoffs, the Red Sox had a chance to beat the Yankees for the pennant and then go on to the World Series -- which they hadn't won in 86 years, a span filled with misses, just-barely-misses, and crushing disappointments spread over four generations of fans. When it looked like they had a chance, the members of a Sox internet forum, "The Sons of Sam Horn," began posting a dedicatory thread naming people, living and no longer living, for whom they hoped the team would win. The thread became a phenomenon, and when the Sox did win the pennant, it continued on thru the World Series itself, night after night, capturing exactly why it was, and is, that we care about a ridiculous game played by overpaid jerks in baggy pants. It's impossible for any Sox fan to read this thread without tears, and it's impossible for anyone to read it without realizing, at long last, why baseball matters. It's the only internet thread ever enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Win it For...

[dhermann1]

Yeah, Tony C.