I have entertained you for years with stories of my lack of physical prowess. We all know I cannot run. I have no hand to eye coordination. When God passed out the ability to take in multiple physical instructions and execute them simultaneously, I was, apparently, hiding behind a door. I tried playing volleyball in the 8th grade. In our group picture, you know, the one that goes into a yearbook for people to look at for the rest of their lives, everyone is casually resting back on their heels with their arms held in a way that normal humans would hold their arms. Mine, however, were unnaturally straightened to the point that the insides of my elbows look like my actual elbows. If you stare at it for a few minutes, you might believe my arms are on backwards or that I needed reconstructive surgery after some horrid car accident. Nope. It’s just that someone told me to hold my arms perfectly straight so that the ball would come into contact with my wrists first. I took that to mean “hold them like that until you die.” All this to say that you’re reading what will probably be the only column I ever write about sports. ‘Cause baby, the Texas Rangers just won the World Series. Cue fireworks.
To understand baseball, you first must understand radio. Not the reinvented Jefferson Airplane turns Jefferson Starship turns just Starship singing about Marconi playing the mamba. Even Grace Slick admits “We Built this City” was the worst song of the 80s, though Marconi is credited with inventing the radio. I’m talking about the radio as a precursor to television, that tall wooden box thing children on Walton’s Mountain would gather around every evening and be grounded from if they sassed their dad while he was cutting lumber. See, the radio was as annoying to WWI era families as television is to us today. Yet, it was the only source of info from the outside world, if you could afford one. Need news from the frontlines of war? Hello, radio. Need music besides what your sister plays on the parlor piano each afternoon? Radio again. Need dramatic reenactments of anything from Shakespeare to Aesop’s Fables? Good old radio to the rescue. That takes us to August of 1921 when a man named Harold Arlin took to the airwaves on KDKA out of Pittsburgh, PA, to talk us through a game between the Phillies and the Pirates. Two things happened. The Pirates beat the Phillies 8-5, and the country went crazy for professional baseball.
While Arlin, with his pleasant and not-unflattering voice (actual review), was an immediate hit with fans, there was a problem. Baseball broadcasting was nothing but a lot of talking. 1920s microphones couldn’t pick up field sounds, & attempts to place them closer to the action resulted in lots of curse words from the crowd being transmitted into living rooms. Easy, said the newly formed radio networks. We’ll recreate the noises in the booth! I’m not lying. Watch 1984’s The Natural, starring Robert Redford, one of the best movies ever made. Multiple announcers sit in a booth overlooking the baseball diamond. They make sounds with their mouths. They hit blocks of wood with mallets. They blow into odd noisemakers. All this in the name of convincing people that they are close to the action. Why, you’re practically on the field with the players. Sure, away games had to be broadcast via telegraphs of the plays, which was interesting. Seems the radio stations were making money glove over bat but didn’t want to spend a dime to get the broadcasters to the opponent’s field.
As a child, I can remember my grandfather in Seagoville, sitting on the steps of his back porch in the 70s, his portable Panasonic radio precariously tilted to one edge with the antennae fully extended. W.D. Pickard always wore the same thing: a white, shortsleeved pearl snap shirt with a pastel plaid pattern and a pair of gray slacks with black steeltoed shoes that had laces short enough to not touch the ground, even when they were untied, which was always something about retirement and the enjoyment of not having to do what other people told you to do. In his right front shirt pocket, there was an ink pen and a tiny tube of nitroglycerin tablets. He was prone to heart attacks (foreshadowing). He carried his can of Prince Albert tobacco on the left side. The Rangers were playing. He would sit there for the entirety of the game, occasionally carrying the radio into his garage with the dank, dirt floor, in search of replacement batteries. “DD, he would say,” (though he went through a phase when he renamed me Tucson, but that is a topic best left for another column), “come on out here. Be real quiet. Fergie Jenkins is pitching today.” And, quiet you would be. It was the Rangers. Years later, my first father-inlaw would sit at the edge of his opened garage, facing his garden, and listening to the Rangers. His voice in later years was prone to a wavy texture, fading in and out with volume, his Czech accent strong enough to cut with a knife. He would sit there and shell pecans for hours on end, the 3 dozen grandchildren of his 9 children running around “like a bunch of bozos.” “Mother,” he would say to his wife, “I think the Rangers gonna do it this year.”
Hey, Rangers, congratulations on your first World Series title. Anti-athletic, uncoordinated me watched every minute of the series. And, I think Heaven was full of your biggest fans, complete with wooden mallets and angelic noisemakers. Everything is bigger in Texas, especially the hearts of Rangers fans.
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