Where It All Began

How I became interested in collecting old baseball radio broadcasts

Where It All Began

I came across this on Facebook the other day:

This advertisement comes from the Winter 1995-96 APBA catalog. It’s one of two Danrick Enterprise advertisements from APBA catalogs around that time that I’m aware of.

I think this is the advertisement I used when I asked my dad for my first broadcast cassette. At some point in time we obtained a complete copy of the Danrick Enterprise catalog, and we slowly started to build up a large collection.

Charlie Schwartzbard, the man who ran Danrick Enterprises, was actually a nice guy. I exchanged a number of emails with him over the years, and got to know him fairly well. He had some interesting stories about those old tapes, including some somewhat sketchy deals about getting parts of the Pat Rispole collection from John Miley.

I’d argue that Schwartzbard had a lot more to do with the current state of collecting old radio broadcasts than Miley. Miley was the sort of collector who grabbed on to anything he could and refused to share with others. Schwartzbard was much more willing to list and sell old games in whatever state they happened to be - including some recordings that were particularly rough.

There was apparently some sort of game taping and trading scene sometime in the late 1970s. The number of games available skyrockets around 1977, and it’s pretty clear that there were fans in every major league city who were recording key games locally. I’m not sure how all of that worked, but it would be an interesting part of history to dig into if possible.

Unfortunately, Danrick Enterprises and baseballtapes.com is now defunct. Fortunately, though, the famous Miley Collection now offers more games than it ever did in the past — and the quality is a lot better than the old cassette tapes.

I’ve always wished that more baseball fans knew about these tapes. It’s a small hobby, and many collectors know each other personally. For a sport that prides itself on its history, baseball actually does a pretty bad job extending access to important historical recordings to everybody interested.