Document text
Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Recreated ball games were a hit N ot that I have spent a lot of time researching this question, but so far I have been unable to learn who invented "recreated" baseball broadcasts on radio. If you are younger than 60 or so, you probably have never heard of re-created games. Thousands of minor league baseball games from the late 1920s through the 1950s were called by sportscasters who weren't at the games they described. Even a future president, Ronald Reagan, learned how to recreate ball games as a 24-year old radio sportscaster in Iowa. I heard my first broadcast of this type in the late 1930s, but I really was exposed to how it worked in 1946, when I worked for a new station in St. Joseph, Mo. Paul Roscoe, part-owner and manager of the station, had broadcast hundreds of live games and dozens of recreations during his two decades as a sportscaster. How could anybody recreate a baseball game on radio? The system depended on Western Union, the telegram people, who provided game information for radio stations that could not afford to send sportscasters to other cities to broadcast ball games. The stations hired a Western Union man to put a report on a special wire directly to the studio. He would send just the briefest information, such as: "Smith at bat. Davis pitching. Ball one, ball two, strike one, ball three, Smith home run over left fence." All the details that would make the game sound real had to come from the sportscaster. Since most of them had been around the game for a long time and knew all the players, it was relatively easy for them to add details: "Smith steps out of the box...knocks the dirt out of his cleats with his bat...steps back in...Davis goes into his windup, ball one..." The real secret to doing a convincing broadcast was to start 30 minutes after the actual game had started. This would give the sportscaster time to make notes on the Teletype paper about things to talk about. In earlier times, the Western Union man at the game would use a Morse code key to to send dots and dashes to the station, where another Western Union man would type the words the operator had sent. Later, I worked in Portland for a radio station owned by the now-defunct Oregon Journal, Portland's evening newspaper. There I got to know sportscaster Bob Blackburn, who did color for the old-timer of baseball broadcaster, Rollie Truett. Blackburn was in his 30s back than, and Truett was probably nearing 70, but he hadn't slowed down a bit in re-creating games for Portland's Class A ball team. Unlike the earlier broadcasts of the 1930s, where all you heard was the announcer, Truett and Blackburn worked hard to make the broadcast believable. In the control room, an engineer operated a sound board and two turntables. These were used to spin 16-inch acetate recordings of ball-game sounds. One of the records was about 15 minutes of typical background noise at the ballpark _ vendors shouting "dog and beer," and all the other sounds of a large crowd. These sounds were played in the background. The other turntable had a record with several cuts of crowd excitement for the times when someone hit a home run or a pitcher struck out a batter in a crucial situation. The engineer kept the background noises going, and added the various sounds of excitement when signaled by Truett. Truett's equipment for the broadcast consisted of a regular-sized bat and a kid's toy wooden bat about a foot long. On all of his game recreations over a couple of decades, Truett always broadcast with the bottle bat held between his legs. When it was time for a batter to make a hit, Truett would hit the big bat with the kid's bat. The resulting "crack" sounded real to the listeners. To make a couple of typewritten pages serve as your only script for a two-hour broadcast of a game required long experience and one heck of an imagination. Then came television, which not only killed recreated baseball broadcasts, but also made it hard for minor league teams to be profitable. I wish you could have heard ol' Rollie Truett and his sidekick make a radio-studio broadcast sound like it was live. Truett died some years back. Bob Blackburn went on to become the voice of the Sonics. I'll bet they had fond memories of the days when a big bat, a kid's bat, recorded crowd noises and a lot of imagination could produce a miracle in the listener's minds. Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA