Baseball on the Radio

To enjoy baseball, there’s no substitute for watching a game in person. You can take in the action from every angle, or you can tune it all out and just enjoy the energy of the ballpark. To understand baseball, you’d do better following on TV. The intimate dance of the batter and pitcher—the tension at the heart of the game—comes to life under the gaze of the center field camera (I know, I know…but I’m also right). But any fan will tell you: to appreciate baseball, listen to the radio.

The fuzzy, imperfectly translated nature of the radio broadcast befits the way we experience the game as a whole. With 30 teams and 162 games in a season, we aren’t meant to internalize every detail. Compared to football, which is to be gorged on in one weekend binge and then digested all week, or soccer, relegated to the early morning hours to be sought out by europhiles and perverts, baseball exists in an ever-flowing stream, there to be found via radio tuner at all hours of every day. The result of each particular game matters hardly at all. One play, one pitch, is just a drop of water flowing by, scarcely noticed. Teams surge up the standings only to recede, like so many oxbow lakes.

And such is the experience of listening to a baseball game. Your attention follows a few beats of the narrative: a runner on, a full count, a double play to get out of the inning. Tension builds and releases. Then your mind drifts, spurred on by an anecdote or lulled into indifference by an ad break. The action, such as it is, is mentioned only in passing between details of a story about something Stan Musial did during his 1948 MVP year. And suddenly, (especially in this era of games accelerated by the pitch clock) you come around to discover it’s already the seventh inning and two runs have scored without anyone alerting you.

In the same way, the specific details of the play on the field are only vaguely communicated. This, to me, is the true joy of baseball on the radio. Though there are but a few potential outcomes of any given pitch, each one comes in a million distinct varieties. Given just a fraction of the necessary information—the angle, direction, and power, we are left to interpolate the trajectory of a hit or thrown ball based on our ever-growing inventory of context from game stacked upon game. A word contains a thousand pictures, in a sense: a liner flies low and fast, while a smash tears chaotically through the infield. A grounder has a chance to be a hit, whereas a chopper is sure to find the defender’s glove. A bloop, flare, pop up, and can of corn each imply a different trajectory. And here, a high drive—followed by an expectant pause as your attention snaps back, the ball suspended in two possible trajectories, one over the wall and one caught at the track—at the warning track, and, adios, pelota!

As your ear tunes itself to the rhythms of baseball on the radio, you can start to call your own game in time with the broadcasters. And because the sound of the event reaches you before the description does, you have a few hundred chances to test your acuity each game. Each outcome has its own character, discernible even through the fuzz. A home run has a crack or a pop distinguishable from the lesser noises of a hit or foul tip. A strike and a ball, I’m convinced, sound ever so slightly different based on how it hits the catcher’s mitt. A cheer from the crowd gives a critical hint as a double play unfolds.

Any story about baseball on the radio has a similar narrow band of possibilities, a series of events you can intuit before you hear them. The author necessarily hagiographizes the great voices of the game, the paternal figures that lulled generations of young boys to sleep over the crackle of the transistor radio. (Did transistor radios crackle?) Vin Scully, the ne plus ultra of broadcasters, is evoked as such. The regional nature of the game is referenced, and a few of the local legends (Caray, Shannon, Uecker) are called out. Gestures are made to link the old game and its old technology to their modern iterations, implying both hope for the future of the sport as well as a gentle preference for the more traditional forms.

I wasn’t there for most of it, but of course I agree. I think Vin was a tad overrated but I know that’s just my anti-Dodger bias talking. In conversation, I refer to the Giants’ team of Jon Miller, Dave Fleming, Mike Krukow, Duane Kuiper as my four baseball dads. I reject every fill-in announcer who takes up the call because some of the core four are too old or infirm now to make every trip with the team. I wear my Duane Kuiper #18 jersey on opening day and on every trip to the ballpark, because while the players come and go, and while my identification with the team started to slip once I began to understand that San Francisco Giants Baseball LLC is a business and not a public good, what endures is that sense of familiarity when I tune to 680AM about a hundred times a year.