Growing up, I was my Dad's shadow in the garage and yard helping on various projects, depending on the time of year. As we measured pieces of wood for a deck, or stacked wood on the side for Winter heating, Daddy would turn on his radio perched on a special shelf he built. The neutral colored and subtle radio box had big golden nobs, and a tweed speaker cover. Although it's appearance was bland, the sound coming from that ordinary brown cube was deep and boastful. The tube radio became a favorite and gem memory as I grew up. The programs varied from public radio stories, symphony, to one of my favorite choices, listening to America's past time, baseball.
My fondest memories came from the other traveling radio box built in our family car traversing to and from vast lands far and wide West of the Mississippi. My brother, sister and I spent countless hours with Daddy on our Summer road trips to any distant destination (usually a National Park). That incredible deep sound and intimacy of his car radio carved a significant space in my mind...
What seemed like the middle of the night to a 7 year-old, my dad would adjust the dial and like 'magic' out of thin air, we would have the pleasure of listening to an Athletics, Giants, or Dodgers baseball game from hundreds of miles away.... Announcers have that incredible talent of creating the vision of action on the diamond out of their selective verbiage, and blessed drama-driven voices. From the back seat of a Datsun 510 hatchback appeared an emerald green field... dugouts... umpires... and finally baseball players donning stirrups and black cleats roaming the outfield and bases filled in the front seats and windshield.
That Datsun is long gone, yet the nostalgia of a baseball game on the radio remains... Sound technology has only enriched the experience of the game coming out of a radio box!. One of the features I enjoy is the fact our flagship sports station that carries the San Francisco Giants games boasts 50,000 watts. That means, whenever I drive to visit family and friends down in Southern California, I enjoy the drive with AT&T (or any visitor's yard, like Safeco Field) park in my passenger seat down to Los Angeles! Technology and witty production gives us the pleasure of hearing crowds, the crisp crack of a louisville slugger when a player connects with a baseball, whether it be a ground out, double or the distinct connection of a squared-up ball smacked out of the yard, "Adios Belota!"... The game brings me the ambiance of listening to a strikeout where the prominent pounce of the ball hitting the catcher's mitt, and the exilerated reaction of the announcer confirming our immediate hope of "Strike three rung up!" within milliseconds time. Every listener builds a relationship with the action and announcers of a baseball game. The most famous calls in history have been made on a platform losing its luster. I will never waiver from my love of radio and the play-by-play... The images and talent from the best of baseball will always conjure up priceless gems of sound giving me site in to the 'perfect' American past time (baseball) originating from an ordinary box wired to create that picturesque image stamped in our memories until we lose consciousness...
Thank you Daddy, and Grandpa for giving me an amazing resource for beautiful images, sounds, and love for the game of baseball on that radio box!
With that said... A clip of the historical first 'Perfect' game pitched by Matt Cain of the San Francisco Giants:
