BATTER UP!

Raw Movietone footage shot on April 14, 1931 at Yankee Stadium as the Yankees meet the Red Sox on Opening Day. 70,000 people were in the stands to see the Yanks pull off a 6 to 3 win.


Note the blank uniforms -- the Yankees didn't wear the "NY" crest on their home jerseys until 1936.

This game was broadcast over the NBC radio networks, with Graham McNamee announcing, but the voiceover you hear calling bits of game action is not him -- it's the Movietone sound man throwing in a bit of ad-lib commentary.

⇧ Great stuff - thanks for posting - getting more excited for opening day.

Ruth just doesn't look athletic, at all, right up to the minute he swings and then there's a control that reflect his ability to get all his weight into that swing.

Kids in ties / men in hats / women looking like they're going to a ball or something

Opening Day was pretty close to a national holiday at that time. Game time was 1:55, so it's likely all those kids were cutting school.

Mayor Jimmy Walker is the guy in the derby throwing out the first ball.

Fantastic. I love these vignettes of real life as a way to look back at unscripted mannerisms and so forth.

Full stands in the middle of a weekday afternoon, baseball must have really been something special.

Someone here might have an answer... in old films and I believe radio as well, we often hear announcers and performers with much higher-pitched voices than we typically hear now. I wonder, was this some result of the medium, or did people more often talk in a higher pitch?

Most early sports broadcasters worked in a high, loud voice to overcome the crowd noise and project an air of excitement. The style of baseball broadcasting thru the 1930s was to maintain a high level of tension in the voice thruout the game -- the conversational style of sports broadcasting didn't really come along until the 1940s, and didn't really become dominant until the 1960s. The low-pitched, conversational Vin Scully style of sports broadcaster would not have been hired in the 1930s.

The fellow in this newsreel is doing a pretty good simulation of what a baseball broadcaster actually sounded like in the early 1930s. The most frequent World Series broadcaster of the decade, NBC's Tom Manning, worked in a style very close to what's heard here.

You can hear Manning at work, along with Ford Bond and Graham McNamee, in this broadcast:


Graham McNamee was also the voice of Universal Newsreel, which is one reason why his voice might sound familiar: it turns up in a lot of historic news clips.

Most successful general-assignment radio announcers of the 1930s -- the Milton Crosses, the Jimmy Wallingtons, the Don Wilsons, the Harry Von Zells, etc. -- were tenors or light baritones, as these types of voice were considered the most pleasant to hear and the most convincing when it came to commercial selling. The only really successful bass announcer voices belonged to Basil Ruysdael -- who spent much of his radio career doing Lucky Strike commercials -- and Bill Hay, long known as the announcer for "Amos 'n' Andy." I can't think of any other really low-pitched announcers who made much of an impression in the Era.

This all makes sense, they needed to cut through and hold the audience--and it works.
I listened to a 1969 Vin Scully broadcast for comparison, and while he is slightly less strident, still has that quality.
Listening to Ned Martin in 1975, that approach seems to be nearly gone--perhaps that's why I used to fall asleep during the radio broadcasts in grandma's kitchen. Or maybe it was just the Sox.

I loved Ned -- his was one of the formative voices of my life, and taught me to love the English language as much as the game itself. There was no other broadcaster in the history of baseball who could work an ad-lib mention of William Makepeace Thackeray into a cigar commercial and get away with it. There'll never be another like him.

"...to overcome crowd noise...," "...needed to cut through..."

Was that a technology issue where mics in those days captured more background noise than, I guess, by the '60s / '70s when announcer voices started to change?

Well into the 1930s the preferred microphone for remote use was the double-button carbon mic -- it was rugged and more portable than condenser or ribbon microphones, but it was also sensitive on both sides -- so the face away from the announcer tended to pick up as much sound as the face the announcer was talking into. At a small function with a small audience this wasn't much of a problem, but when you had 70,000 people screaming it could easily become overwhelming.


(Graham McNamee covering a World Series game with a Western Electric carbon mic. He didn't even have a booth -- he worked from a field-level box seat.)

They would sometimes try to deal with this by using a condenser mic -- that's the square box you see in the scene in the 1931 footage where Walker is throwing out the first ball -- but it was very inconvenient to do this because such mics required a complicated power supply using a thick and unwieldy cable, so it was seldom done. It wasn't until the development of the electrodynamic moving-coil mic in the mid-thirties that this problem was overcome -- these mics worked so well at excluding crowd noise that they had to start using parabolic mics mounted outside the radio booth to get any crowd noise at all.



(Red Barber, in the foreground, and his sidekick "Brother Al" Helfer in the booth at Ebbets Field in 1940, using RCA dynamic mics. Although Brother Al certainly had a taste for the stuff, his hand signal does not mean that he is ordering a bottle of Ballantine Ale.)

By the 1940s and 1950s, the dynamic mic was universally used for all remote work, and allowed the broadcaster to work close to the mic, encouraging an intimate, more casual style of broadcasting. There were still plenty of old-time shouters around -- Harry Caray, Bert Wilson, and others of that type seemed to be much more popular with Midwestern fans than the quiet, conversational Scully-Barber-Curt Gowdy types found in the East -- but they were fast becoming a regional preference rather than a dominant style.

LizzieMaine said:

Well into the 1930s the preferred microphone for remote use was the double-button carbon mic -- it was rugged and more portable than condenser or ribbon microphones, but it was also sensitive on both sides -- so the face away from the announcer tended to pick up as much sound as the face the announcer was talking into. At a small function with a small audience this wasn't much of a problem, but when you had 70,000 people screaming it could easily become overwhelming.

They would sometimes try to deal with this by using a condenser mic -- that's the square box you see in the scene in the 1931 footage where Walker is throwing out the first ball -- but it was very inconvenient to do this because such mics required a complicated power supply using a thick and unwieldy cable, so it was seldom done. It wasn't until the development of the electrodynamic moving-coil mic in the mid-thirties that this problem was overcome -- these mics worked so well at excluding crowd noise that they had to start using parabolic mics mounted outside the radio booth to get any crowd noise at all.

By the 1940s and 1950s, the dynamic mic was universally used for all remote work, and allowed the broadcaster to work close to the mic, encouraging an intimate, more casual style of broadcasting. There were still plenty of old-time shouters around -- Harry Caray, Bert Wilson, and others of that type seemed to be much more popular with Midwestern fans than the quiet, conversational Scully-Barber-Curt Gowdy types found in the East -- but they were fast becoming a regional preference rather than a dominant style.

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If you don't know, just say so - kidding. As always, thank you for an incredibly detailed answer.

St. Augustine, TX


Rob

Ghostsoldier said:

St. Augustine, TX

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Rob

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looks like a park I might have played in the mid sixties. In one we had an old wrecked truck in deep right field we had to work around and dilapidated wooden dugouts. Had special ground rules if a ball got lodged underneath the wreck. I was a catcher but to spell me off I would get right field duty on doubleheaders. With my bad eyesight playing outfield scared the hell out of me especially in the park with the wreck. My teammates loved it when I played the outfield...said I always managed to bring some excitement into those dog days of summer.

belfastboy said:

looks like a park I might have played in the mid sixties. In one we had an old wrecked truck in deep right field we had to work around and dilapidated wooden dugouts. Had special ground rules if a ball got lodged underneath the wreck. I was a catcher but to spell me off I would get right field duty on doubleheaders. With my bad eyesight playing outfield scared the hell out of me especially in the park with the wreck. My teammates loved it when I played the outfield...said I always managed to bring some excitement into those dog days of summer.

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I've played at parks like that. I've played at professional parks that were immaculately manicured, and at those that amounted to glorified gravel yards. Each one has its own charm...and pain.

My mother's verbatim comment on Opening Day 2018:

"SOX NEW MANAGER IS AN IDIOT."

LizzieMaine said:

My mother's verbatim comment on Opening Day 2018:

"SOX NEW MANAGER IS AN IDIOT."

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She shares my father's skill for being succinct and direct.

Today I found out there once was a girl who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in succession.

What’s even more impressive about that was neither Ruth nor Gehrig managed to even get the bat on the ball when they swung. Ruth swung and missed twice before taking a called third strike. Gehrig swung and missed three times, striking out on just three pitches. Unfortunately for her, what she got for her efforts was to be promptly banned from Major and Minor league baseball by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

2jakes said:

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Today I found out there once was a girl who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in succession.

What’s even more impressive about that was neither Ruth nor Gehrig managed to even get the bat on the ball when they swung. Ruth swung and missed twice before taking a called third strike. Gehrig swung and missed three times, striking out on just three pitches. Unfortunately for her, what she got for her efforts was to be promptly banned from Major and Minor league baseball by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

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Jackie Mitchell was her name. There is much debate about the legitimacy of the feat, with most contemporary accounts and modern historians agreeing that it was staged. Likewise, there is no evidence of Landis banning her, or ever even being aware of her existence. But as the saying goes..."print the legend".

Mitchell was a childhood neighbor of Dazzy Vance, the fireballing pitcher for the Dodgers, and claimed he had taught her the mechanics of what we now call the "slider", although Vance himself never commented one way or another on the story. She was, factually, a well-known high school athlete in Chattanooga, and had played semi-pro for the "Engelettes," a women's team run by Lookouts owner Joe Engel.

Engel's involvement in the story is the main reason to believe it was staged. Engel, who had been a smalltime vaudeville comedian and a mediocre pitcher for the Senators in the 1910s, was the first of the Bill Veeck/Charlie Finley type of sports owners, and was notorious for his wild promotions -- watermelon-eating contests, bags of loose coins dumped on the field for a randomly-chosen fan to hunt down, trading a player for a turkey -- which was then cooked and served to the sportswriters, things like that. Engel also had a direct connection to Babe Ruth -- it was he, by several accounts, who noticed Ruth playing in a school game in Baltimore in 1914 and called him to the attention of minor-league Orioles owner Jack Dunn, thus leading to Ruth's professional career. All this suggests that if such an event were to be staged, Engel would be the one with the connections, the inclination, and the means to do it.

Not to discount Mitchell's ability as a pitcher -- by all accounts of her high school and semipro career, she was a fine all-around athlete. She toured with the House of David team in the 1930s -- she and infielder Eddie Popowski were the only members of that famous squad who didn't have beards -- but gave it up because she got sick of the clowning that was part of the team's routine. She took the game seriously.

My iPhone snap of a favorite scene from “The Natural”