Midnight Library of Baseball

In the beginning, experts swore television would never matter. Viewers would tire of “staring at a plywood box.” Baseball could never be captured on one screen, and no one would trade the color of their imagination for grainy black-and-white flicker. And yet, one messy, chaotic, barely-watchable baseball experiment in 1939 sparked a revolution. In this episode, I trace the improbable origin story of baseball on television, from the fuzzy “little white flies” of the first broadcast to the national shared experiences that made America rush to buy a set for themselves. This is the story of how a single game, and a single swing, helped sell a country on an idea that would transform the future.

Like broadcasts and broadcasters of the early days, the 1992 Simpsons episode, Homer at the Bat, shaped the lives of millions. It made people laugh, it connected people more deeply with their favorite sports heroes by humanizing these mythical figures, and it instilled a deeper curiosity for those on the periphery of the game. If you’re a fan of the Simpsons and baseball, there are many great stories about the making of this episode you won’t want to miss.

Step into the forgotten world of baseball recreation, a unique phenomenon created to fill an enormous void in baseball coverage during the 1920s to the 1950s, a strange blending of truth and fiction that connected millions to the game and their heroes, and introduced millions to a young recreator named Ronald Reagan, who cited baseball recreation as a valuable tool in his journey through American politics.

Before Graham McNamee, there was basic reporting of the game by broadcasters, and long dead silences between plays. But the opera singer turned broadcaster changed the way people listening to their radio interacted with the game, and he paved the way for the type of broadcasting we know and love today. Tune in to listen to this story and more.

In this first episode of Season 4, I discuss a lie I’ve been telling myself for 40 years about who my favorite team actually was, and I begin the amazing journey of baseball broadcasting. Before there was television, there was radio, and before that, there was the telegraph and the amazing broadcasting innovations that came from this limited technology, like scoreboard baseball, and ballgames performed, live, in opera houses. But the first radio broadcasts were missing one crucial ingredient.

It’s easy to compare numbers on paper, but what happens when we do a deep dive into the times and worlds in which Cal Ripken Jr and Lou Gehrig lived? In this final episode of Season 3, I pull back the curtain on what training, medicine, culture, and competition looked like for each man in his day, to get a much better idea of where each man stood in the realm of baseball legacy.