The baseball season's over at your house, but at my place it's in full swing. If you'll forgive the pun, which I just noticed and kind of like. I'm not watching it, though. I'm listening to it. Better that way, in my opinion. My mind can paint a perfectly turned double play just fine. Especially when it's Pee Wee Reese to Jim Gilliam to Gil Hodges. I grew up reading about the legendary players of the game who'd hung up the spikes and, in a lot of cases, shuffled off the planet long before I was born. Well folks, tonight I've been sitting in a darkened room, leaning back in my chair with my eyes closed and the cinema in my mind flickering bright, enjoying game four of the 1949 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

As I've been telling you in past columns, once you learn your way around the Net, your OTR collection can grow as fast as your connection and your ambition allows it to grow. Since my last column I've picked up another 2,200 programs, paying only for the Internet connection and blank CDs to store them on. Every now and then you come across some sportscasts. They don't seem to be the most popular OTR files by any means, but to me they're solid gold. Of all the items in my collection, it's the baseball broadcasts that give me the most joy. As I write that, Yogi Berra is at the plate with Joe DiMaggio on deck. This isn't some modern day retrospective. This is Red Barber at the microphone. This is time travel. This is.. did you hear me? Joe freakin' DiMaggio is in the on-deck circle!

Okay. I'm assuming non-baseball freaks have clicked over to Closet Philosophy by now, so I'm happily preaching to the choir. Fine by me. Listening to these games can be a shocker at first. With each name you're surprised and jolted, just for a moment. Tommy Henrich just made a base running error and was tagged out by none other than Jackie Robinson. The names keep coming. Mapes, Reece, Roe, Rizzuto... Baseball heaven. Right down to the Gillette Shaver commercial Red Barber delivers between innings.

The Yanks won 6-4, in case you wondered, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that I got the chance to hear the game being called by the great Red Barber, and I most definitely saw it in my mind's eye. Every play, brother. There are several games floating around out there, on OTR newsgroups, on FTP sites, IRC Fserves, etc. Or, if you want to have so many options your head will spin, take a click ride over to www.baseballtapes.com and check out the selections there. You'll find page after page of games you can purchase, ranging from 1934 to present day, and if you send them e-mail they'll send you the REAL catalog, which is much bigger and includes football, hockey and boxing.

The proprietor of baseballtapes.com, Charlie Danrick, has been at this for ages, since the age of 14, in fact, when he found four baseball broadcasts in an old time radio show catalog. "Three Brooklyn and one Yankee game from the '50s," as Danrick remembers it. While most 14 year olds would just listen to them, Danrick had a lightbulb glowing over his head. "I said to myself that they were the nucleus of a business unto its own and bought them," says Danrick. "Then I advertised them in Sports Collectors Digest in a $4 ad and bought a high speed tape duplicator." That four dollar investment paid off with four thousand dollars in orders, which Danrick used in a clever way. "I turned [the profits] into advertising in newspapers nationwide in a search for more games. A lot of fans replied and the business was born."

But nothing's that simple, especially when you're dealing with a mega-entity like Major League Baseball. We can all repeat the warning practically word for word. "Any use or rebroadcast of..." One wonders just how difficult it would be to start such a business. "Very," says Danrick without hesitation. "I was a pioneer and they didn't like it and threatened to sue me. Finally [the commissioner of baseball] Peter Ueberroth saw potential in what I was doing and licensed me officially. The rest is history." Ah, but Ueberroth is gone and the Commissioner is... well, the... somebody's kind of in charge while the owners rape the fans, anyway. Has the status changed? Not according to Danrick. "I get along fine with everyone in the office of Major League Baseball." I believe that makes him the only person who does, actually.

I guess I'd get along with them, too, if it meant I'd have a warehouse full of tapes of historic games to sit and drool in. I asked Charlie if being the boss means getting to listen to a lot of baseball. "True," he readily admitted." "I not only like to hear the games for their nostalgic value, but I also get a kick out of analyzing the styles of announcers. I go back to the likes of Tom Manning, Ty Tyson, Bill Corum and the '30s White Sox announcers all the way up to today's greats like Sterling and Kay." Keeping my Mel Allen cards close to the vest, I asked Charlie who he thought the best of all time was. "In MY opinion," he said, and let's face it, this is a man that knows, "the best broadcaster was and is Vin Scully, and it isn't even close." Vin Scully. Damn. I'd forgotten about Vin Scully. I slid my Mel Allen cards carefully into my sleeve and nodded in agreement. By this point all baseball history buffs are doomed to repeat the questions of the past. The who were/what was/which team questions that seem to fascinate us no end. I had to ask.

"Okay, Charlie, you've got access to all the great games and I know you hear 'em. Which was THE game?"

"October 3rd, 1951. Dodgers at Giants. The 'shot heard round the world' playoff game. I was 13 at the time, an avid Dodger fan and this game taught me to weather setbacks for a lifetime." I wondered what the Red Sox fans felt like in that respect, but Charlie wasn't through. "The April 22nd, 1950, Giants at Brooklyn, because Jackie Robinson was the hero and I loved the man. Talk about a genuine hero. The most courageous man to ever play major league baseball." As Charlie speaks, his passion for the game and the players becomes clearer and clearer, and I realize he gets the exact same kind of buzz I get when I hear that Frankie Frisch is walking up to the plate. "Game 6 of the '75 World Series," Charlie continues," when Carlton Fisk hit one into the night in extra innings. It's the best World Series game ever played." And the most recent? "Game 1, 1988 World Series, in which a hobbled Kirk Gibson homered in the last of the 9th to win it. Jack Buck's call will go down as a classic, 'I don't believe what I just saw...I don't believe what I just saw.'"

That's pretty much what I kept saying when I went through the list of Charlie's games on tape. I saw about a thousand I wanted and a few hundred I considered emergency purchases. Unfortunately, finances being what they are, that's not so realistic. It is, after all, a business, but if you ask Charlie he'll quickly tell you there's a personal side to it for him. "How do you think I feel when Larry King orders tapes," he asks, "or Jon Miller, Steve Landesberg, Hank Greenwald, Ryne Sandberg, Dave Rozema, Sal Yvars of the '51 Giants, Paul Olden, the voice of the Devil Rays, Ernie Harwell and others? And when I went to the '88 All Star Game in Cincy and dined with the players and their wives as well as having a beer with the great Johnny Vandermeer and talking to Warren Spahn, Luke Appling, Gaylord Perry, Ernie Banks and a ton of other Old Timers? And when my wife and I were invited to a cocktail party at Yankee Stadium and dined at the table with some of Mr. Steinbrenner's closest employees." As one of my eyebrows arches involuntarily into an accusatory hook, Charlie is way ahead of me. "And by the way, he had MUCH to do with the success of my business. If anyone tells you George Steinbrenner's lousy, don't believe it. I know for a fact his heart is as big as he is."

So now you know about Charlie Danrick's little corner of the Old Time Radio universe, filled with memories of glory and heroics and a simpler time, when ball players didn't seem to mind being role models. There are so many little pockets to explore in the OTR hobby. This is one of my favorites, and maybe, with a little bit of exploring, you'll find some of it out there and see what it does for you.

(C) 2000 - DJ Johnson