The Other 50th Anniversary

I have a scrap of memory of the first baseball game I heard on the radio.

The Tigers were playing, and someone had just driven in the run that made the score 17-14. 

You can look everything up now, and on Baseball Reference's game logs is a 17-14 win, over the Kansas City Athletics in the second game of a doubleheader at Municipal Stadium, on July 23, 1961. 

Wayne Causey got the hit, a solo homer off Bill Fischer in the eighth inning. Ernie Harwell -- the young man from Baltimore who was halfway through his second season at the Tiger radio mike -- called the play.

Causey was a rookie and didn't have a card in the 1961 Topps set or any set. Bill Fischer was a high number (#553). I got him in a wax pack that fall.

In the Stone Age, baseball play-by-play came via tinny land lines and transistor radios, and the choices were what you could get off the air. That often meant listening through fades and static, and setting the radio by an open window, back pointed just right.

Fifty years to the day after that first game, I have my laptop out on the back yard, logged onto Gameday; Athletics at Yankees, both the New York and Oakland broadcasts; mid-fi mono but fade and static free, much better than the way we did things in the good old days. 

John Sterling is talking about his memories of, when he was a kid, hanging out at the pool and / or beach on steamy hot days like today with a ball game on the radio. Suzyn Waldman has no response. You have to have been there and done it, and maybe she never did.

There are also Astros at Cubs, three games at four PM, a bunch at seven, and Dodgers-Nats for the late scene. All accessible at the click of a mouse, and in 1961 only dreamers considered that possible.


The A's gave up 17 runs last night. Couldn't happen again, could it? With the American League's best ERA?

They might do it again just for you, opines Madame Maggie. Anything is possible. 


For US, my queen, I say; since we, not knowing the exact day we met over baseball cards on the playground, have set aside this day to celebrate our golden anniversary. 

My queen has passed on a celebratory dinner out. She's up to something. I once suggested, in jest, that on anniversary Saturday she cook in and make fifty of something. 

Maybe she will. Anything is possible.