BW - EP138—001: Baseball Memories From Radio History—Dots And Dashes

Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

If you’ve tuned into Breaking Walls episodes before, you know I rarely editorialize. I’m just the messenger bringing the news. The origins belong to men and women who gave radio their blood, sweat, and tears through radio’s highest highs and lowest lows. I grew up in a home with my grandparents and great-grandparents listening to The Golden Age of Radio. It was a hobby and nothing more. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I came to a crux: Do I attempt to live out my childhood dream of being on the pitcher's mound in game seven of some future World Series, or do I focus on getting into one of the top art colleges in the country? I chose the latter. But it wasn’t an easy choice. My high school art thesis centered around a rhetorical question: “What does it mean to me to be an American?” Since age eight Baseball has been one the strongest answers. For those tuning in that aren’t baseball fans, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can say to make you feel emotion towards the game, but I can also try. Take this clip for instance. It’s Wednesday, October 4th, 1995 and those damned New York Yankees are back in the playoffs for the first time in fourteen years. The Yankees captain is Don Mattingly. A beloved family man from Evansville, Indiana, for six seasons he was arguably baseball’s best player. Though only thirty-four, a bad back made him a shell of his former self. Mattingly played seventeen-hundred-eighty-five regular season games before getting the chance to play in the playoffs. If you’ve watched enough baseball — especially with the Yankees — you know that ghosts are always around the corner. And that’s essentially what tonight’s episode is: A ghost story. Some ghost stories are scary and some are sentimental. Sometimes, they’re a little of both.