Baseball best enjoyed via radio broadcast

Occasionally I read something that causes me to ask, "Why didn't I write that?"

Most recently I asked that question after reading Steve Rushin's column in the July 30, 2001, issue of Sports Illustrated. The column declared the author's preference for radio rather than TV broadcasts of baseball games.

Rushin recalled joyful memories of growing up with the sounds of summer baseball on the radio.

I repeat, why didn't I write that? The sounds of baseball on radio coalesce with other sights and sounds into the rhythms that activate in me a nostalgic voyage back to another time.

It's like seeing a comic book advertisement for the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension program that allowed a 98-pound weakling to retaliate against the bully who earlier kicked sand in his face, or the sound of the "William Tell Overture," the pounding of "the hoofbeats of the great horse Silver" and the radio voice proclaiming, "The Lone Ranger Rides again!"

In the days before TV, radio was the only show in town; there was no other sport on radio to compete with baseball for a kid's attention.

Professional football didn't exist in my mind. I don't recall ever listening to a basketball game. A few college football games were broadcast on Saturday afternoons in the fall, but I wasn't interested.

Baseball on radio WAS summer; even today it is indelibly etched in my memory, along with water splashing in the municipal swimming pool and Saturday afternoon summer movie double features, plus serials and cartoons.

Oh, sure. Baseball on TV is OK, but it isn't like radio. Some people say that baseball moves too slowly for TV. Yes, there is a lot of dead time in baseball. TV highlights the pauses; good play-by-play radio announcers can fill the voids and keep things going with their chatter.

Besides, in the "faster" moving game of basketball, the last five minutes can take a half hour or more to play. In football, the clock stops after every play; however, so many players are rushing on and off the field that TV viewers don't notice the lulls.

Baseball is the only game not controlled by a clock, which means that as long as one turn at bat remains, there is a chance of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, or vice versa. A baseball game can't end with the whistle blowing as a runner heads for home plate. As Yogi Berra said, "it ain't over till it's over." Hope can be kept alive on radio regardless of the score; on TV, the faces of players on the losing team pretty well tell you that the game is over. But a good play-by-play announcer can keep you fired up until it is "over."

I once heard Harry Caray broadcasting a St. Louis Card-inals game with the Cardinals nine runs behind. Harry, the eternal optimist, said, "A couple of grand slam home runs and the Cardinals are right back in this one."

This wouldn't have gone over on TV, but it sounded possible on radio. A lazy fly ball to the outfield on TV is boring; the radio account can turn it into a blast saved from being a home run by a sensational, leaping, twisting catch by the center fielder.

Ah, the youthful images of my heroes. Baseball players were easy to idolize. They weren't multimillionaires who moved from one team with deep pockets to another team with even a deeper pocket. Radio broadcasters described my he-roes' bigger-than-life-exploits. To me, they were heroic be-cause radio accounts of their exploits were heroic.

Among the memories I hold dear of baseball on radio are what may be the two most dramatic moments in baseball history. One was the live radio account I heard of the "Shot Heard Around the World," Bobby Thompson's dramatic ninth-inning home run enabling the New York Giants (not San Francisco Giants) to beat out the Brooklyn Dodgers (not Los Angeles Dodgers) for the National League pennant.

The other great baseball moment was a live Armed Forces Radio broadcast I listened to aboard a U.S. Navy ship somewhere on the South China Sea. It was the game in which New York Yankees pitcher Don Larsen hurled the only perfect game ever in a World Series.

Had I grown up with TV, I might have been less of a baseball fan. When radio was all there was, baseball sounded to me like the greatest game there was. The sound of baseball on the airwaves was what summer was all about. It still is at least I think it is.

(Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury University.)