The Voices Of Baseball

An in-depth look at each of Major League Baseball’s thirty ballparks from the perspectives of the game’s longest-tenured storytellers—the broadcasters. With decades of broadcasting between them, 50 broadcasters share their fondest memories from the booth, encapsulating some of baseball’s greatest moments.

The author compiles a list of the top 101 sports announcers, focusing on their coverage of the greatest moments in the game, from the Bobby Thompson "Shot Heard 'Round the World" to the 1988 World Series, covering Dick Enberg, Harry Caray, Mel Allen, and Ernie Harwell, among other announcers. Original.

The foremost historian of the "blackball" era spent nearly 10 years researching this acclaimed oral history, interviewing 17 outstanding players including Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard, and Willie Wells. Over 80 vintage photographs.

WGN announcer Pat Hughes presents Harry Caray: Voice of the Fans, an audio/photo tribute to Chicago and St Louis sports broadcaster Harry Caray, one of the most beloved figures in baseball. Caray's personality was as much a part of his charm as his broadcasting skill, and even ten years after his death, baseball fans across the country recall Caray fondly, both for his play-by play calls and his genuinely excited "Holy Cow!" exclamations during the games. Pat Hughes has compiled Caray's most famous calls and broadcasts onto a CD that accompanies the book. By combining Harry's voice with photos and stories of the Cards and Cubs, Harry Caray: Voice of the Fans will give readers not only a fond memory of Caray, but also a "where were you when...?" for many famous games, such as Ryne Sandberg's double game-tying home runs in 1984.

Baseball lore is replete with the tales of such legendary Negro League stars as Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson and a few others. But the stories of the many other African Americans, both stars and journeymen, have largely been forgotten. These were the men who barnstormed the country, playing in loosely organized leagues and eking out a living doing what they did best, playing baseball. In this work, 52 players reminisce about what it was like to play in the Negro Leagues, from the great teams and players to the terrible Jim Crow conditions they faced in the South. Now in their sixties, seventies and eighties, these men reflect on their careers with humor, bluntness, and poignancy, providing a rich record of a part of the game that is quickly being lost to history.

Funny, moving, and each one a diamond in the rough of the American consciousness, the essays in this book are the ultimate baseball conversation that pays homage to the perfect sport, in this perfect companion for all our personal baseball journeys. For some people baseball means a memory-of a certain dusty ball field on a certain summer day, or the first time they walked into a major league park and saw the perfect emerald playing field. For some, baseball means one heartbreaking or heroic moment. And for others, it means a father, a friend, or an old flame who shared a game for a day or for a lifetime. To create this marvelous book, more than 150 writers, athletes, celebrities, politicians, presidents, and pundits were asked what baseball means to them. The answers came back with richness, wonder, insight, and poetry. A fascinating portrait of baseball's beautiful nuances, What Baseball means to me marks the greatest collection of original essays ever written about the game. Accompanied by more than 200 classic baseball photographs, the voices in this book bring alive the game in all its venues-in the past and present, in wartime and hard times, in Cuba, in Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium. We meet players in a different light: including Paul Molitor returning a baseball to a trusting boy named Dan Jansen, Derek Jeter as depicted by his dad, the Toledo Mud Hens as seen through the eyes of Christine Brennan, and Pedro Martinez talking about baseball as a way of life in his native Dominican Republic. Most of all, we meet ordinary Americans, like the kids Rudy Giuliani grew up with in Brooklyn, or the man in Philadelphia who transforms himself for every home game from mild-mannered Tom Burgoyne to the Phillie Phanatic.

Calling the Game: Baseball Broadcasting from 1920 to the Present is an exhaustive, meticulously researched history of bringing the national pastime out of the ballparks and into living rooms via the airwaves. Every play-by-play announcer, color commentator, and ex-ballplayer who has presented a Major League Baseball game to the public is included here. So is every broadcast deal, radio station, and TV network. In addition to chapters for each of the game's thirty franchises, a history of national broadcasting and a look at some of the game's most memorable national broadcast moments are included, as are a foreword by "Voice of the Chicago Cubs" Pat Hughes, and an afterword by Jacques Doucet, the "Voice of the Montreal Expos, 1972-2004." Each team chapter presents a chronological look from how and when the team began broadcasting (since all of the original sixteen major-league franchises predate radio) through the 2014 season. Author Stuart Shea details the history and strategies that shaped each club's broadcast crews, including the highlights and scandals, the hirings and firings, the sponsorships and corporate maneuverings. From the leap to Brooklyn from the radio booth of the Atlanta Crackers by young Ernie Harwell, to the dismissal of Mel Allen by the Yankees, from the tutelage of the now-legendary Vin Scully under the wing of the already legendary Red Barber, to the ascendance of the great Jack Buck to the number one chair in St. Louis upon the ouster of Harry Caray, the stories of the personalities who connect us to the game are all here. Calling the Game is a groundbreaking and illuminating look at the people and the story behind the soundtrack of summer for millions of baseball fans.