Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Indians 6, Senators 3

I sent link to an audio file of most of a baseball game from 1939 to two bloggers earlier this week.  Here's the story behind it.  The story came out in an email to one of them.  Instant blog post.  Huzzah!

So, there I was, surfing the card blogs and came across dayf's post: I got nothin'. I commented on the Dale Murphy card with the cute Cubbie ball girl. I couldn't remember Marla Collins' name, so I had to look. Found an audio link to a funny Harry Caray bit.

That made me wonder what other audio stuff was on the web, baseball related. I hit up a few Old Time Radio sites. They want you to pay for some stuff I know is freely accessible.

Off to archive.org I went. Searched for baseball in their audio collection.

I remember seeing the WJSV complete day broadcast before but hadn't really explored it.

Seeing that the Indians were playing the Senators made me think of --David, over at TribeCards.net.

WJSV starts broadcasting the game starting in the middle of the fourth inning.

So, I grabbed the two audio slices that contained the game, downloaded Audacity and went to work for 20 minutes or so.

After doing some minor editing (mostly cleaning up the start and stop pauses between tracks) I shared it with --David and Matthew.  I posted it online (72MB mp3 file).  Then I found that someone else had already culled the two parts to make one.

I found a newspaper box score for the game...
Reading Eagle - September 22, 1939
And the winning pitcher?

1941 Play Ball
Happy Milner (card # 33)
image lifted from this ebay auction

And Matthew, of the fantastic Number 5 Type Collection blog, pointed out that the broadcast includes an appearance by Alex Carrasquel (dubbed "Alexander" on air), the first Venezuelan-born MLB player, during his debut year.
1970 Venezuelan Sport Grafico
Alexander Carrasquel (card # 250)
image lifted from this ebay auction

Matthew provided me the link to the box score.  I normally like retrosheet.org for these sort of things, but baseball-reference has all those pretty clickable links. b-r wins this time.

So now you know how I waste my time.  You're welcome.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for the recording! I am working on my own blog post about it, but I have to say I was glued to my car radio in a way I havent been in a long time! I felt like I was right there, stepping back into an era of long ago and yet much of it could have been from yesterday evening. Amazing!

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  2. Wow, contrasting those two cards (Happy and Alex) is something else.

    Thanks to your pointer, I also found the Quaker Oats (and US Navy) sponsored "Adventures of Babe Ruth":

    http://www.archive.org/details/AdventuresOfBabeRuth

    Episode 5 starts with a lengthy promo for the US Navy and hints that they produced a baseball book back in the 1930s. That would be something to find!

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