Fixing the 1975 World Series Game 2 Radio Broadcast

A bit of a backstory

Fixing the 1975 World Series Game 2 Radio Broadcast

I’ve got a confession to make.

Years ago — seriously, it was about 20 years ago — a friend and I decided to jointly start up a collection of baseball radio broadcasts.

We used a variety of places to source our games. I downloaded a number of games from mlb.com, including an almost complete collection of every 2008 Chicago Cubs game (which you can find in the members section). My friend collected a huge number of audio tapes from the now defunct Danrick Enterprises, and worked on creating MP3 files for each of those games.

We didn’t worry much about audio quality. We just wanted to have something we could listen to in the car, something that wouldn’t take up a ton of disk space.

I’ve even got an original iPod sitting around in my closet somewhere filled to the brim with our collection. I think it might still work, though I haven’t charged it in years.

You’ve probably heard most of our collection, actually. There are a few YouTube channels that redistributed the mp3 files we made. For a while I gave the collection out for free to friends of mine via Google Drive. Most of the games have spread far and wide, and I no longer worry about this vital part of baseball history simply vanishing.

But, of course, the quality isn’t good. In some cases, the audio quality is really bad.

I’ve been slowly trying to acquire higher quality versions of certain key games to improve the collection. I’ve also done some slight remastering of the audio to bring out the voices a little bit. I’ve uploaded two on YouTube so far:

Paying subscribers can download high quality FLAC versions of these games in the members section. This is the highest quality we’re likely going to get — and it really is a joy to listen to.

But there’s a story.

The version of game 2 of the 1975 World Series I acquired moved over to the television broadcast part way through the top of the 9th inning.

I didn’t realize this until I listened to the whole thing while creating my review of that game the other day:

It appears that the person who originally recorded the tape — likely famous broadcast recorder Pat Rispole of Schenectady, New York — switched over to the television broadcast at that point for whatever reason. There’s a station identification break during the final few minutes that identifies itself as a Schenectady television station.

Of course, that’s a problem. I wanted to listen to the original radio broadcast, not yet another recording of the more common television broadcast.

Fortunately, the old Danrick Enterprises version we collected all those years ago came from a different source.

You’ll notice a drop in audio quality when you get to that part of game 2. Hopefully it won’t be too noticable. I tried remastering our old MP3 file as well, and honestly think that it sounds tolerable.

I’ll say more in the future about Danrick Enterprises, Pat Rispole, and John Miley and all his associated controversy. It still puzzles me to consider just how much of the history of baseball has been split up and commandeered by paranoid hoarders and people who don’t want to share.