The Art and Artifice of Early Radio Baseball Re-creations

Banished by bedtime to my second floor room, I lay beneath the blankets, a transistor wedged beside my ear. I turned to baseball like heliotrope turns toward the sun.

Curt Smith, Voices of the Game

How many of us fell asleep at night with the radio on as the game was called?

Tom Snyder, talk show host

As Susan Douglas writes in her history of radio, Listening In: Radio and American Imagination, recollections like those above represent "warm, enfolding memories . . . shared by millions, most but hardly all of them men and boys, who fell asleep, or mowed the lawn, or tinkered at a work bench, or drove around while listening to baseball on the radio."¹

While unsuspecting listeners did not generally know it at the time, early radio broadcasts of baseball were often, at best, a re-creation of reality, not reality itself. Due partly to the lack of a budget, inadequate technology, and the resistance of team owners to broadcasting games live for fear of hurting business at the gate, early radio broadcasts actually were imaginative reenactments of games that had already been played moments or even hours earlier. At best the radio broadcaster was a few innings behind the actual game itself because it took time for scores and descriptions of the game to be transported from the game's location via a telegraph machine to a teletype receiver in the radio station's studio hundreds of miles away.

The game would then be re-created in the following manner. First, a telegraph operator transmitted game information back to the studio with the results printed out on ticker tape. Then, engineers and broadcasters used the ticker tape to recreate the game, swing by swing, for their rapt audience of radio listeners. Sometimes the game was long over, giving the radio team more time to plan their embellishments to, what may or may not have been, a real "nailbiter."

Re-creations of baseball were a necessity in the 1930s and were bolstered by the fact that the system was cheap. "Away games . . . weren't broadcast live in the 1930s," writes Douglas, "because it was deemed too expensive to send an announcer off with the team and to pay the AT&T line charges to send the transmission back home." The cost was about $25 a game to re-create the action, compared to thousands in line fees to carry the game live. The $25 fee was a bargain; it covered the fee for a telegraph operator stationed in the ballpark and another at the radio station. The latter sat at a typewriter wearing headphones and translated the Morse code messages into an alphabet code for the announcer to interpret. This system—while implemented to save money—led to, as Douglas puts it, "one of the most impressive acts of broadcasting in any genre: the re-creation of the ballgame."²

Re-creations have a respectable pedigree beyond the baseball diamond. Baseball announcers were the first, but they weren't the only ones to use sound effects and imaginative language to manufacture the impression that they were actually on location and describing play-by-play action as it unfolded. In the 1930s football borrowed the practice from baseball, and perhaps the most notable conjurer of the illusion of sport re-creation landed his first job in the entertainment industry at WOC in Davenport, Iowa, as a football announcer. The year was 1932, and Ronald "Dutch" Reagan—who, forty-eight years later, would use his oratorical skills to win occupancy of the White House as the fortieth President of the United States—was paid $5 a game for his services."³

Re-creations, filled as they were with the imaginative meanderings of the radio broadcaster, were used especially for a team's away games, which presented a special challenge for baseball broadcasters because of the minimal information received from the wire services. Re-creations also became a popular form of programming on days when a home team had no game scheduled at home or away. In those instances, a game featuring distant, less familiar...