1940's Baseball

[Fading Fast]

What I love about Scully is that he, along with other great TV announcers of his era, knew when to keep his mouth shut. Not the best quality but the audio is good below. What's striking about this great call is that after he says the ball is gone, he rightly allows the pandemonium of the crowd to be the star... would any announcer today keep quiet for as long as Scully does here?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U157X0jy5iw

++++1. My Dad - a man of very few words - loved Vin Scully. Maybe in inning seven, after six innings of not a single word but an occasion grumble, he'd say, "that's a man who knows how to call game," followed by three more innings of silence.

Definitely a National Treasure.

 

[2jakes]

++++1. My Dad - a man of very few words - loved Vin Scully. Maybe in inning seven, after six innings of not a single word but an occasion grumble, he'd say, "that's a man who knows how to call game," followed by three more innings of silence.

Definitely a National Treasure.

This was also the case when London would do the broadcasts of the Wimbledon matches on the telly.
I miss that.

 

[pawineguy]

Given how little local baseball broadcasting before the 70s exists, we're fortunate that, relatively speaking, so much of Scully's work has been preserved. When you watch his call of Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, he's so poised and composed that it's hard to believe he's only 29 years old there.

What's interesting to me is that he really does seem to have been the first of his generation of broadcasters. He learned at Red Barber's knee, but when you listen to what survives of Barber's work from the 1930s and 1940s, he is a bit less willing to let crowd noise tell the story than he liked to remember that he was. Scully, on the other hand, as far back as you can go in his available recordings -- that 1956 World Series game is the earliest example of his work that I've heard, although there are a few fragments extant from 1955 -- seems to have had an instinctive feel for when to shut up.

This clip might be the most perfect ten minutes of baseball broadcasting ever done by anyone, anywhere. It's not just great sportscasting, it verges on great literature.

Just finished listening, I've heard the ending but it was interesting to listen to the entire inning. Just brilliant broadcasting. Because I was curious, I used the stopwatch on my phone and timed the two calls. After the final strike of Koufax's perfect game, he was silent for 40 seconds. After the Gibson home run call, silence for 1 minute and 8 seconds.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

This was the theme song for the Dodgers pregame show with Vin Scully on the radio.

[video=youtube;xB_nWFmHVNA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB_nWFmHVNA[/video]

 

[Braz]

Watching the Cubs @ Dodgers TV last night (the Cubs feed) and the Chicago announcers laid out for half an inning and tapped into Scully's audio instead. Neat little tribute, I thought. They also noted that Vin still works alone, with no "color" commentator.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Just finished listening, I've heard the ending but it was interesting to listen to the entire inning. Just brilliant broadcasting. Because I was curious, I used the stopwatch on my phone and timed the two calls. After the final strike of Koufax's perfect game, he was silent for 40 seconds. After the Gibson home run call, silence for 1 minute and 8 seconds.

Scully also called Hank Aaron's record breaking 715th home run. Milo Hamilton's (another long time PBP man, 1953-2012) call is the one heard most often of that moment, as the Braves were the home team, but Scully was the road call. He was silent for over a minute and a half. When he came back as Aaron was being mobbed at the plate, he uttered his famous "a black man getting a stand ovation in the deep south..." line.

As much as I love watching baseball on TV, television has all but killed the radio broadcast. What makes Scully so good is that he is one of the few left who understands that the listener cannot see what's going on, and is relying on his telling to paint a picture. There are a few young ones out there who get this, and every single one of them point to Scully.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Here's the best surviving example of an early Scully regular-season broadcast, a Cubs-Dodgers game from June of 1957. It's notable in that despite a frisson of excitement over a potential no-hitter by a very young Sandy Koufax, nothing particularly notable happens -- it's just a routine game, one of 154 out of the season -- but Scully nevertheless turns it into something special. Note especially when third-string Dodger catcher Joe Pignatano comes into the game when Roy Campanella is injured -- Scully points out this is his first appearance at Ebbets Field, and he urges listeners who know Pignatano's wife to give her a phone call and let her know in case she isn't tuned in. It's impossible to imagine a modern-day broadcaster having that kind of rapport with his audience.

[video=youtube;9w7Kt1vo-3Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w7Kt1vo-3Y[/video]

Scully didn't forget the Pignatano incident -- in the last broadcast of the 1957 season, the last game the Brooklyn Dodgers would ever play -- he recalls asking listeners to give Mrs. Pignatano a call, and mentions that she got so many calls she ended up being quite aggravated with him! That's typical Scully -- set up a story, and then three months later come back to it with a payoff.

 

[Harp]

No other sport lends itself to great literature like baseball.

David Halberstam's The Teammates chronicles the last reunion of Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio---
Williams has always struck me as an extraordinarily complex nature. Another book, Bob Feller's Memoirs-Diamond Wisdom from the Mound
offers a fascinating first-person account of the majors. The Catcher Was A Spy, recounts the life of enigmatic and mercurial Moe Berg.
Berg fascinates and his post-war haze remains inexplicable from a lay perspective.
The game and its literature cast spells. ....a side note, I once read a letter up for auction that was written by Ty Cobb,
and its prose struck immense erudition-a trait not normally associated with Cobb. Surprises abound in all sports, but baseball particularly so.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That's a great book. For another side of Williams I strongly recommend Shelby Whitfield's 1973 look at the last days of the Washington Senators, "Kiss It Goodbye." Williams was, of course, the manager of that club, and was right in the middle of all the controversy, with the slimy, chiseling team owner Bob Short on the one side, and a team of misfit players like Denny McLain on the other. Whitfield, the Senators' broadcaster for 1969 and 1970 managed to genuinely befriend Williams, and has some hilarious stories of what Ted was like in middle-age, and some sober analysis of why he ultimately failed as a manager.

 

[Harp]

That's a great book. For another side of Williams I strongly recommend Shelby Whitfield's 1973 look at the last days of the Washington Senators, "Kiss It Goodbye." Williams was, of course, the manager of that club... and some sober analysis of why he ultimately failed as a manager.

I will look into Whitfield's Kiss It Goodbye. Another Williams book I need to read is Ben Bradlee's The Kid; The Immortal Life of Ted Williams.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Relaxing this afternoon by tuning in on Game Four of the 1944 World Series, the only Series ever to feature the major leagues' equivalent of the WPA, the St. Louis Browns. A combination of grit, smart managing by Luke Sewell, and the fact that most of the real ballplayers were in the service allowed the Brownies to cop the American League pennant, and they actually enjoy a two-games-to-one advantage over the Cardinals going into this game. The immortal Sigmund Jackuki is on the mound for the Browns, and Harry "The Cat" Brecheen starts for the Cardinals.

This is also famous for being the series that Browns announcer Dizzy Dean was specifically barred from broadcasting, because Commissioner Landis found his hillbilly act offensive and in poor taste. With Bob Elson and Mel Allen both in the service, and Red Barber having commitments in New York, it's left for boxing announcer Don Dunphy and bland Mutual staff man Bill Slater to call the play by play.

One of the great wartime baseball mysteries is this: just how did the Cardinals manage to go thru the 1942, 1943, and 1944 seasons with the core of their lineup just happening not to have been drafted?

 

[hatsRme]

Reading through here for the first time, I must share the memory of a Cubs game in 2000 at Wrigley Field where my brother and his then-new bride took my mother to her first pro ball game in MANY years.

How many years? Think about THIS... Mom's comment, (early in the event) was that "the last time she had attended a Pro game, there were no "Negro" players!"
She then said, "it's a better game now."

THAT was quite a reminder of 1940's Baseball...

 

[LizzieMaine]

There's no question that the integration of the game gave the National League longstanding superiority over the American, which lagged behind in recruiting top Negro League talent while it was available. The NL also led the way in recruiting Latin players during the postwar years, further adding to its superiority.

An interesting footnote to the integration story -- while Jackie Robinson is appropriately recognized as the first African-American to play major league ball in the twentieth century, there's strong evidence that Roberto Estalella, a swarthy-complected Cuban outfielder who joined the Washington Senators in 1935, was in fact of partial African ancestry, and would have been considered "black" in the US had this bit of information been made public. Senators owner Clark Griffith danced around the color line frequently in the 1930s and 40s, employing an unusual number of Latin players who were invariably presented as "white." Griffith didn't want to be the one to formally break the color line -- he made a substantial amount of his income each season renting out his ballpark to the Homestead Grays, and he didn't want to undermine the Negro Leagues -- but he also recognized that there was a great deal of talent out there for the taking if one was willing to play it cagey.

 

[2jakes]

“Cuban newspapers of the period had a good time discussing the fact that while everyone
in Cuba “knew” about Estalella’s racial background, he was such a good player that Clark
Griffith’s Senators were quite happy to look the other way, cough-cough and pretend
that the half black, half white third linesman was “white” after all..."

Daily Campello Art News: Sep 3, 2013

“Tarzan”
(as nicknamed by the press)

 

[LizzieMaine]

After years of searching I've finally found video footage of one of my favorite baseball memories -- the legendary "Popowski Flip." Eddie Popowski was a coach for the Red Sox in the sixties and seventies who had played on the famous House of David barnstorming team in the thirties -- where he learned a number of comedy ball-handling routines. Every now and then, when a foul ball found its way to the third-base coaching box, he'd toss it back to the pitcher using a unique over-and-under-and-behind-the-back delivery. This clip is the only known video footage, from 1970, of "The Popowski Flip."

Today's baseball, with all its costumed mascots and overproduced gimmicky promotions, could stand a bit of this sort of silly, down-home showmanship. Pop died in 2001, and was buried in his Red Sox uniform. No Sox fan who saw him will ever forget him.

 

[2jakes]

After years of searching I've finally found video footage of one of my favorite baseball memories -- the legendary "Popowski Flip." Eddie Popowski was a coach for the Red Sox in the sixties and seventies who had played on the famous House of David barnstorming team in the thirties -- where he learned a number of comedy ball-handling routines. Every now and then, when a foul ball found its way to the third-base coaching box, he'd toss it back to the pitcher using a unique over-and-under-and-behind-the-back delivery. This clip is the only known video footage, from 1970, of "The Popowski Flip."

Today's baseball, with all its costumed mascots and overproduced gimmicky promotions, could stand a bit of this sort of silly, down-home showmanship. Pop died in 2001, and was buried in his Red Sox uniform. No Sox fan who saw him will ever forget him.

Lizzie,
You mentioned tuning in to Game Four 1944 World Series.
Could you elaborate on the source, is it available or is this from your extensive files?
Thanks.
J

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's available on CD from www.baseballdirect.com. They have quite a good collection of original radio broadcasts.

 

[Fading Fast]

"Popowski flip-" fanfreakentastic. Just awesome. Lizzie, wonderful memory and wonderful find.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That little clip just about sums up why I fell in love with the Red Sox -- you've got Popowski doing his bit with the ball, Ned Martin is the broadcaster you hear, and the guy fouling it off is Tony Conigliaro. That's an entire New England summer in one sentence. It's very hard for me to realize that all three of them are gone now.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ In a similar vien, Phil Rizzuto's voice coming out of a 1950s table top radio announcing a Yankee's game puts me right back to being a kid in summer. Those broadcasts, on that resonate old radio with his voice and the echo of the stadium in the background, was the theme music of my summers. And when you listened to or watched a game with my dad - a professional gambler for whom these games were a business - you didn't speak, you just listened, so his broadcasts were a focus of my summers.