In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Memories from the Microphone: A Century of Baseball Broadcasting by Curt Smith
  • Alan L. Griggs
Curt Smith. Memories from the Microphone: A Century of Baseball Broadcasting. Coral Gables, FL: Mango Publishing Group, 2021. 315 pp. Cloth, $19.95.

Sixty-five years later the mental picture of that lone magnolia tree standing proudly just beyond the center-field fence at Ponce de Leon Park in Atlanta is as fresh as the days I sat in the grandstand, glove in hand, waiting vainly for a foul ball from one of my beloved Atlanta Crackers. Over five hundred feet from home plate, that tree remained in play for many years until a new owner decided to move the outfield fence in by fifty feet.

No doubt Ernie Harwell, fresh out of the marines, had fun with that magnolia while calling Crackers games briefly before heading on to bigger cities and greener fields. Ernie’s brief stint in Atlanta was a little before my time, but that surprising fact and many others like it, I discovered in Curt Smith’s book about the history of baseball broadcasting. Curt has created not only a chronological order of prominent radio and television announcers but a compendium of historic baseball plays highlighting the careers of these legends of the air. This is a true baseball fan’s baseball book: an enlivened peek inside the fun, daffy, strange, and yes, cynical world of outsized personalities who delivered our national pastime to adoring fans through dots and dashes, scratchy airwaves, primitive black-and-white pictures, and finally the advent of color and cable.

I, for one, learned much from this book, combining my love of baseball with a career in broadcasting—news, not sports—a much-debated career choice, since I ended up covering mayhem rather than Mays, Mantle, and Maris, but I digress. The heart of Smith’s book is enlightening and colorful: mini profiles of the announcing greats of the game painted with a panache that captures the imagination.

Beginning with Harold Arlin and his pioneering call over Pittsburgh’s KDKA back in 1921, Smith takes us through generations of gentlemen who brought baseball to the front porches and backyards of America. On August 5, Arlin wasn’t in a fancy broadcast booth behind home plate. In fact he was in the outfield bleachers for the Pirates-Phillies game, using a telephone as a microphone. The man who would become the “Voice of America” had created an entirely new dimension of enjoyment for sports fans.

Soon, a young man arrived in New York from Minneapolis having studied voice as a church singer. That voice helped set Graham McNamee apart from others, and he was quickly hired by AT&T to provide analysis for the 1923 World Series. Few families owned a radio at that time, but many of those who did let radio station WEAF know that they loved McNamee and his call of the [End Page 124] games, propelling him to eventually become one of the all-time great sports announcers.

There are enough such little-known stories in this book to keep you engaged on this unique baseball journey for quite a while. There is Charles Carroll, also known as Pat Flanagan, also known as the man who invented re-creations of baseball games on the radio, a particular style of broadcasting that called for timely use of vocal variety and a heavy dose of imagination to enthrall listening audiences.

The 1930s brought the distinctively southern voices of the “Old Redhead” Red Barber and the “Rembrandt of the Re-creation” Arch McDonald at a time when radio was coming into its own, to the chagrin of many purists who saw it as destroying game attendance. It is hard to imagine today just how controversial radio play-by-play of the national pastime was. Those who saw it as the death knell of the sport were thankfully wrong. What happened instead was an explosion of national personalities, men who became household names because of their distinctive calls of the game as well as their unique verbiage.

There were Bob Elson and Jack Brickhouse in Chicago, both of whom were behind the mic for decades...

pdf