The Sunday Memory Drawer - Baseball on the Radio

It has come to this.   Again.

My only access to Los Angeles Dodgers baseball these days is via the radio.  Not necessarily these transistors which fans toted into Chavez Ravine back in the 60s to hear their beloved Vin Scully.  But I have a nice Bose radio on the desk in my bedroom.   And that's where I am whenever the Dodgers are playing.

The reasons why the Dodgers are not that available on TV are too numerous to mention.  The team did a megadeal with Time Warner Cable and now that service is holding up other television providers over very expensive rights fees.   It is a clusterf*&k of mega-proportions and, for a myriad of good excuses, I'm not going to write more about it here.  Just suffice to say that 70% of the Los Angeles marketplace has been reduced to connecting with their team via that great household appliance of the 20s.  I'm a Direct TV subscriber myself.  I welcome myself to the club.

So, I sit at my desk at night and imagine what's happening through the words of Vin Scully, Charlie Steiner, and Rick Monday.   I do some paperwork there to justify the time I languish in front of my computer.   The sensation is akin to my life in the fourth grade.  When I would listen to Mets games on my transistor radio.  The voices of Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy, and Ralph Kiner easing my way through another dreary Social Studies homework assignment.

And I've had plenty of time to think about that illustrious past as Matt Kemp has just lunged for a ball in the dirt again. Indeed, this baseball fan emerged just as thousands of others did.  The initial contact we all had to the national pastime was the radio.  Letting us all think about the color of the grass and the color of the team caps and the wind that is howling all around the Shea Stadium upper deck.  Lindsey tells me that there are hot dog wrappers blowing all over the outfield.  I close my eyes and can see this.

To grow a young baseball fan, you need the radio.  It acts as an incubator.  It singlehandedly grew the Dodger fan base in Los Angeles.   There was virtually no TV coverage of the Dodgers when they first moved West.   Only nine games a season were televised---the ones when they played the Giants in San Francisco.  If you wanted to see the team, you had to buy a ticket into the park.  Or close your eyes and let it all play out on the stadium located conveniently on the back of your eyelids.

Growing up in New York, we were luckier.  The Mets and the Yankees were on television quite a bit.   That often did me little good.  In my pre-portable-TV-in-my-room days, we had two television consoles in our house.  Grandma and Grandpa commandeered theirs downstairs.  My parents controlled upstairs. 

So I would tune to WHN in my room.  And "watch" baseball.

The first time I ever saw the Mets, it was on TV.   But the way I learned all about them night after night was on radio.  And also the way that I began to understand...and love baseball.

The transistor and I and the Mets were inseparable.  Home games.  Away games.  Spring training games.  I had stayed home "sick" from school one Wednesday afternoon so I could listen to a meaningless exhibition game from Florida.  I just happened to be home that day when my grandfather died.  I was the one who had to run to the grocery store to get my mother when my grandmother called for me upstairs.   I was there as our family changed that day.  

And it was all because I was listening to the Mets on the radio.

Now, back in the day, night games started at 8PM.  The real problem came when the Mets made one of their three West Coast trips every season.   That meant game time on the radio for me was 11PM and I was in bed asleep.

Um, not so much.  Thank God for transistor radios with earpieces.  Upstairs, I really only had my mother to worry about it and she was already zonked out.  My dad worked nights and wasn't home from Connecticut till 1AM.  So, it was free and clear for me to curl up under the covers with the radio earpiece transporting me to places like San Francisco and Los Angeles.  LA?  As far as I knew, the place was on the moon. 

Of course, during the summer months, lying under the bed sheets proved to be a sweaty proposition.  New York humidity doesn't call for multi-layered linens on top of you.  It became a little perilous to go undetected staying connected to my Mets.

My dad liked to provide me with a little public service.  Since he was driving home from work during those West Coast late games, he'd listen on the car radio.   And then leave me a note on the kitchen table that I would see when I got up for school in the morning.

METS UP 3-2 IN THE EIGHTH. 

That's the point where my father turned off the car radio and retired for the night.  I would then add an addendum to the note on my way out for him to see when he got up.

METS WIN 4-3 IN TEN INNINGS.

For years, my father didn't know that I wasn't pulling the final score from the morning news on the radio.   It was because I had listened to the whole damn thing!

When you spend that much time listening to your team on the radio, you start to know how it will sound in your head.   You had the favorite phrases of the announcers engrained in your noggin.  You knew how Ralph Kiner would call a home run ("it is gone, goodbye") and how, after a Met victory, Bob Murphy would take you through the "happy recap."

So, of course, I would become the announcer whenever I staged my pretend baseball games in the backyard.  I'd be the Met pitcher, throwing strikes against the back brick stoop.  Whoosh.  Whoosh.  Whoosh.  All the while, I was the lone soundtrack.   I was the P.A. announcer, introducing the line-ups just like Jack Lightcap did at Shea Stadium.  And then I would call the game just like Lindsey, Ralph, or Bob. 

I was one noisy kid for somebody who was playing by himself in the backyard.  This would go on until Grandma on the first floor in her kitchen had heard enough.

"Oh, shaddap already."

That would end my baseball announcing career.  Until the very next afternoon.

My baseball announcing career ended for good in college.  WFUV broadcast all the games of the Fordham Rams baseball squad and those of us in the sports department took turns calling the games.  One chilly afternoon on Jack Coffey Field, it was my chance to do three innings of baseball play-by-play.  In the same spot where perhaps Vin Scully himself had sat decades earlier.

If my grandmother was tuned in, she would have said it all over again with the rest of the New York metropolitan area.

"Oh, shaddap already."

I was that bad.  I suddenly couldn't tell the difference between a fast ball and a curve.  I had the wrong players in the wrong positions.  I couldn't see if that was a bunt single or a deep fly to the warning track.   If the college station's license was up for renewal, I would not have been surprised if the FCC had intervened.

I went off onto other career paths.  But continued to listen to baseball games on the radio. 

Thanks to the Dodger TV snafu, I still am.  And it's not so bad. 

Oh, who am I kidding?  It sucks.  But, at the very least, there is still that audio connection.  I can picture the stadium.  The clouds the way Vin Scully colorfully describes them.  And just where that home run landed.

"She is.....gone."

Dinner last night:  Beef with garlic sauce from Century Dragon.