The Origins Of The Collection
Where it all began
The Origins Of The Collection
You might remember this post I made a few months ago:
I was talking then, of course, about my large (but not complete) collection of historic baseball broadcasts in MP3 format.
If you haven’t seen it yet, I’ve got a large collection that paying subscribers can access in the members area. The collection currently sits at just over 2200 games, including some that don’t generally spread among collectors (such as the complete 2008 Chicago Cubs season).
You’re probably wondering where it all started. Let me turn back the clock a bit.
My exposure to the world of radio broadcast collecting came sometime in the mid 1990s. Following its first bankruptcy, there was a brief period of time in which the APBA Game Company’s catalogs featured advertising from Danrick Enterprises.
The ads featured language something like this:
Danrick was run by a man named Charles Schwartzbard, who I believe has since passed away. Schwartzbard had a very large collection of radio broadcasts, and priced his tapes relatively competitively, as I explained in this post:
The first game my dad and I bought was the July 30, 1936 Athletics at White Sox broadcast.
The story behind that broadcast is actually fairly interesting. As you might already know, there was a Yankees — White Sox doubleheader on July 26, 1936 at Comiskey Park. That doubleheader was marred by a fan who threw a pop bottle at an umpire:
I actually went into more detail about the game and the incident in this video almost a year ago:
One of the interesting side effects of the near riot was that Commisioner Landis asked for transcription disks to be made of a week’s worth of White Sox home game broadcasts.
Apparently no recording was made for the July 27, 1936 game against the Philadelphia Athletics. However, the next 3 games against the Athletics were recorded, as well as the complete subsequent series against the Red Sox, including both games of the Sunday doubleheader on August 2.
It wasn’t common for regular season games to be recorded at that time. In fact, the only older game is a somewhat random September 20, 1934 broadcast between the New York Yankees and Detroit Tigers in Detroit. All other early recordings are of All-Star Games or World Series games.
I don’t know when the July 30, 1936 game hit the open market, or exactly what path it took. My understanding is that all pre-1950 complete game recordings were eventually stored at the Hall of Fame, and that the Hall of Fame asked an audio specialist to transfer the records to cassette tape at some point in time in the 1980s. It’s taken years for the games to slowly trickle out, and it’s possible that we don’t have everything that the Hall of Fame has.
In particular, it’s likely that the following games were recorded but have not yet been released:
Game 3 and 5 of the 1934 World Series
Games 1, 2, 4, and 5 of the 1935 World Series
Games 2 and 4 of the 1936 World Series
And so on. We have reason to strongly suspect that these broadcasts were at least recorded, since complete copies of other broadcasts from those World Series have eventually been released — most within the last 15 years.
We also know that there is an alternate version of Game 7 of the 1934 World Series (the entire series was broadcast on multiple networks, believe it or not). We know this because The Miley Collection offers part of that broadcast as a bonus on its version of Game 7.
The way these games trickle out is also kind of funny. For example, a few decades ago the Library of Congress declared the radio broadcast of Game 4 of the 1941 World Series should be protected in its audio archives. This game didn’t circulate at the time — but it came into the community soon after. Game 4, of course, is the famous game where Mickey Owen dropped the third strike that would have ended the ball game, giving the Yankees a chance to score multiple runs to beat the Dodgers.
While you can find quite a few games on YouTube, it doesn’t seem that all of the games in my collection are currently available. And I’ve been adding more games, including games in higher quality.
So, if you haven’t yet, seriously think about becoming a paying member of the blog. It supports my work — and you’ll get instant access to a very large collection of old radio broadcasts.