THE BEST BASEBALL THAT EVER WASN'T

THE BEST BASEBALL THAT EVER WASN'T
By Dick Meister

Panoramic camera shots from high above the field of play, shots from so
close we can see sweat dripping from the players, instant replays, slow
motion shots from the right of plays, from the left, from the rear, head
on....

Yet another season of televised baseball is upon us, yet another season
of viewing baseball from every conceivable angle. But despite the
technological razzle-dazzle, it's not anywhere near as exciting as baseball
was on the radio in those far away days before television.

I remember back then, back in the 1940s when we'd sit fidgeting in my
living room, three or four of us usually, pounding our baseball gloves and
staring with great expectation into the glowing green eye near the top of
the tall radio that stood in a corner.

Suddenly there'd be the muffled sound of a crowd roaring, and we'd jump to
our feet as a homely, compelling voice shouted out to us:

"It's going ... going ... it's gone! Right through Aunt Maggie's window! A
home run! A homer!"

It was Jack Macdonald, the radio voice of the San Francisco Seals of the
Pacific Coast League in the 1940s. He was the wondrous source of
inning-by-inning reports on the progress of our team, at home in Seals
Stadium or, especially, on the road in Hollywood, Los Angeles, San Diego,
Seattle and other West Coast cities that seemed as far off and exotic as any
places on earth.

"The Old Walnut Farmer," Macdonald called himself, although he was
definitely a city kind of guy. He was, in fact, a native San
Franciscan and graduate of the nearby University of California, where he had
been a not very successful pitcher on the varsity baseball team. But
somewhere along the line, maybe during his lonely rounds as a bakery wagon
driver while working his way through the university, Macdonald taught
himself to talk the way us city folks thought farmers talked, and otherwise
developed an imagination that was more than a match for even those of the
most fantasy-prone eight-year-olds.

Imagination was a great asset in Macdonald's occupation. Its leading
practitioner, Bill Stern, "the most inventive sports broadcaster since Baron
von Muenchaussen," as sportswriter Red Smith once recalled, "solemnly
assured us that when President Lincoln lay dying, the man he called to his
bedside was not Andrew Johnson, his vice president, or Gen. Ulysses S.
Grant, who had just accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, but
Gen. Abner Doubleday. 'General Doubleday, don't let baseball die,' the
president whispered, and breathed his last.'"

Macdonald's inventiveness fairly burst on us when the Seals were playing
outside the city. Macdonald rarely traveled to those games. Like every
other baseball announcer of the time, he stayed behind in a radio studio
when his team was on the road, while at the far-off ballpark a Western Union
operator tapped out a pitch-by-pitch summary of the action in Morse Code.

Another operator in the studio typed up a terse running translation and
tossed it in front of the announcer as he leaned into a fat black microphone
emblazoned with his station's call letters and maybe a jagged streak of
lightning or some other racy symbol of the marvel of electricity.

"S1C [strike one, called]... S2 [strike two, swinging]," the studio
operator's summary would report, "B1L [ball one, low]... double to
right...."

Through Macdonald's voice, S1C became "a wide-breakin' curve that sure
didn't look like it went over that old platter from here, folks ... c'mon,
ump, give us a break."

S2 was "an air-shatterin' ripple at the horsehide that coulda ramycackled
that pill right outa here!"

Macdonald thanked the umpire when he called the B1L, a pitch so low "it dang
near bounced off'n old Frenchy's toe." And that double, what a wonder! It
went "back, back, back," a sure homer through Aunt Maggie's window -- until
it inexplicably sailed down at the very last moment and "banged like a
sledgehammer off'n the fence," as outfielders ran themselves dizzy trying to
catch up to the ball, and Frenchy Uhalt of the Seals went "a-churnin' like a
freight train" into second base.

The cryptic symbols passed to Macdonald were all he needed to put us in the
ballpark. That and recorded game sounds swelling up behind him, fans
roaring, fans heckling, vendors singing out -- "hey cold beer, gitchyer cold
beer here" -- and other noise appropriate to the action he was describing,
including people calling out the names of particular players.

Macdonald was helped, too, by his own strong belief in poetic license and
that of radio technicians, like the sound engineer who blew a factory
whistle exactly at 10 p.m. during the broadcasts of night games in Portland,
because just beyond the centerfield fence of the ballpark there stood a
foundry whose shifts changed exactly at 10 p.m.

Macdonald also made a lot of his own sounds. He'd strike a pencil on a
baseball bat hanging beside him and -- crack! _ someone had smacked out a
hit. He'd pound his fist into a baseball glove and, slap, someone had made
"a really sensational catch." Or at least "a great catch." Routine catches
were almost as rare as left-handed shortstops. So was the hitter who didn't
step from the batter's box to wipe at sweat pouring down his face, who
didn't glare at umpires. Fans always tussled in the stands for foul balls,
flags always billowed in the ballpark breeze, becalmed though the park
actually might be. Macdonald, certainly, never failed to describe thick
clouds of black smoke that seemed to "belch" with astonishing regularity
from the foundry behind the ballpark in Portland.

Nothing stopped the patter of Macdonald and the other announcers, not even
frequent interruptions in Western Union transmissions. Rarely did they admit
to "technical difficulties." Instead, they conjured up field-drenching
rainstorms, the sounds of thunder and pounding rain provided by their
engineers; fist fights in the stands so fierce the game had to be stopped
while park police grappled with the combatants; players who got into lengthy
arguments with umpires or who stepped out of the batter's box to confer at
great length with managers.

Anything could happen, and often did, depending on the fertility of the
announcer's imagination. Few broadcasters admitted what they were doing, few
matched the candor of Dizzy Dean who came clean in a moment of rare
announcer truth-telling while describing a St. Louis Cardinals game. "We
ain't gettin' the stuff the way we're handin' it out to you," old Diz
confessed. "They send us a few words from the ballpark and we have to
make up the rest. It's a lotta bunk."

Ronald Reagan -- he was Dutch Reagan the broadcaster in those days -- used
to brag about having a batter foul off 40 straight pitches after the
telegraph wire broke down during one of the Chicago Cub games he re-created
in the mid-1930s. Even Macdonald never went that far. His favorite, anyway,
was a dog loose on the field. He'd have cops, players, umpires, fans,
everybody but the Old Walnut Farmer himself chasing little black dogs all
over the diamond for the longest damn times.

"Oh, he's a cute little fella. White spots all over his face ... whoops,
looks like Old Pard's got 'im ... nope, not quite. There he goes a-runnin'
to centerfield, lickety- split. Slippery little cuss."

The announcers were as reluctant to admit mistakes as they were to
acknowledge breakdowns in transmissions. One of the most creatively
reluctant, surely, was Dean Maddox, who re-created road games for the
Oakland Acorns of the Pacific Coast League.

After inadvertently skipping over one of the hometown Rainiers' half-innings
during a game from Seattle one night and thus immediately following the end
of an Oakland half-inning with the start of another Oakland half-inning,
Maddox explained cooly that he was describing something that had "never
happened before in baseball history -- the Rainiers are so far ahead,
they've waived their turn at bat."

Sportswriter Scott Ostler recalled "the time a minor league manager stayed
home with the flu and listened to the re-created game on the radio. At one
point the announcer, Dick Stratton, realized he was somehow one out behind
the action, so to correct the problem he had a runner picked off first base.
The manager immediately fired off a telegram fining the player $25 for being
picked off."

Jack Macdonald wasn't the only Scotsman in the re-creation business. There
also was Gordon McLendon of the Liberty Broadcasting System, who re-created
a "major league game of the day" over some 450 stations around the country.

McLendon called himself "The Old Scotchman" -- an 87-year-old "Scotchman,"
to be precise -- even though he was in his 20s; claimed great experience,
even though he had seen exactly one major league game before he began
re-creating the games via Western Union from a subterranean studio in
Dallas after World War II, and otherwise was at least the equal of Old
Walnut Farmer Macdonald, if not of Bill Stern.

McLendon's deep, rich voice was every bit as exciting and compelling as
Macdonald's, he could rap a pencil against a bat as convincingly, his crowds
and players were as noisy and hyperactive, and his games seemed to attract
just as many stray dogs adept at broken-field running. McLendon's studio
technicians weren't slouches, either. He had an engineer who duplicated the
sound of the public address system by sticking his head into a wastebasket
to announce batters as they stepped to the plate, and to periodically alert
doctors to please call their offices.

McLendon kept at it for more than four years, until his poetic license was
revoked by major league club owners. They forced his independent radio
network out of business in 1951 by denying his telegraph operators access to
their stadiums, largely for fear that McLendon's re-creations of big league
games were keeping fans away from the vastly less entertaining games at the
owners' minor league parks.

If only we had been as smart as author Willie Morris, who listened to
McLendon's games as a kid in Mississippi but also listened to the live
broadcasts of games that were beamed around the world by Armed Forces Radio.

Willie, as he recalled in his autobiography, "North Toward Home", would
monitor the shortwave broadcasts of games from New York City, which McLendon
re-created an hour after the fact because of a lag in telegraphic
transmissions. Then, notes in hand, Willie would saunter into one of the
grocery stores or firehouses where listening to McLendon was a daily ritual
and accurately predict, pitch-by-pitch and play-by-play, precisely what the
Old Scotchman was about to report.

"Yogi's gonna hit a one-one pitch down the right field line," Wilie would
say, "and it's gonna be fair by about three or four feet -- I can't say
exactly -- and Henrich's gonna score from second, but the throw is gonna get
Yogi at second by a mile."

And sure enough, over the radio it would come: "Henrich takes the lead off
second. Benton looks over, stretches, delivers. Yogi swings. There's a line
drive down the right side! It's barely inside the foul line. It may go for
extra bases! Henrich's rounding third and coming in with a run. Berra's
moving toward second. Here comes the throw! ... And they get him! They get
Yogi easily on the slide at second!"

"Extra-vision," Willie called the peculiar talent that made him the wonder
of Yazoo, Mississippi -- until his father spoiled it all by giving his
secret away.

Some grownups sneered at the re-created games. They called McLendon,
Macdonald and the others con men because, with few exceptions, they never
let on that they were in radio studios rather than ballparks and led most
people to think, like Willie Morris' neighbors, that they were broadcasting
live.

But so what? The re-creations were much more exciting than most live
broadcasts. Thanks to the imaginative announcers, every game sounded like
the biggest of the year.

Jack Macdonald didn't have to be at those out-of-town ballparks any more
than we did. We had been at Seals Stadium. Just mention the name of any
player and we could see him, and the moves we tried every day to imitate.

Frenchy Uhalt, we knew how he stood all crouched down on the left side of
home plate, the way he ran so smoothly after fly balls, that fluid
right-handed throw, how he shook his head in a slow, tongue-clucking way and
stood right up next to umpires when he was arguing, the bow-legged walk, his
every mannerism.

No one will ever see any players on television or maybe not even in person
as clearly as we saw the San Francisco Seals during the Old Walnut Farmer's
radio broadcasts -- or ever see any games that are more exciting.

We didn't even mind the commercials, at least not when they involved players
endorsing Wheaties, as they often did. That meant we could hear as well as
see our heroes, and we liked Wheaties. We were sure they did, too.
Ballplayers wouldn't lie, and neither would announcers.

Copyright © Dick Meister

Story ID:	1984
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Period Piece
Location:	San Francisco CA USA
Year:	1941
Person:	Jack Macdonald