The History of Following Baseball Games Pre-Radio...

[BaltimoreTerp]

...or, Yeah, I Loved That Scene In Eight Men Out, Too

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/following-baseball-from-puppet-reenactments-to-modern-sportscasts/247416/

Amazing pictures, though it is interesting just how little we've advanced from these devices to GameCast.

[Erstwhile]

When I was a kid (in the 1950s), I would listen to the local AAA team's (Toronto Maple Leafs) games on the radio. When the Leafs were at home, the broadcast was a play-by-play description, just as we have now on the radio. When the Leafs were on the road, the local announcers would sit in a room with a teletype machine and 're-create' the game pitch-by-pitch and play-by-playby adding in bat-cracks and crowd noise and adding lots of excitement just as though it was real. And in fact, as a kid, I thought it was real (even though they admitted it was a recreation, I had no idea what that meant!) for several years until I got suspicious and noticed that the quiescent crowd noise (simulating the low babble that was presumably always there) would repeat every thirty seconds or so.

But these guys who did these recreations were real masters of their craft.

It would be fun if somebody had kept some of the paper rolls that clickedity-clacked out on the teletype, so we could see how much detail they knew, and how much they made up!

[BaltimoreTerp]

When I was a kid (in the 1950s), I would listen to the local AAA team's (Toronto Maple Leafs) games on the radio. When the Leafs were at home, the broadcast was a play-by-play description, just as we have now on the radio. When the Leafs were on the road, the local announcers would sit in a room with a teletype machine and 're-create' the game pitch-by-pitch and play-by-playby adding in bat-cracks and crowd noise and adding lots of excitement just as though it was real. And in fact, as a kid, I thought it was real (even though they admitted it was a recreation, I had no idea what that meant!) for several years until I got suspicious and noticed that the quiescent crowd noise (simulating the low babble that was presumably always there) would repeat every thirty seconds or so.

But these guys who did these recreations were real masters of their craft.

It would be fun if somebody had kept some of the paper rolls that clickedity-clacked out on the teletype, so we could see how much detail they knew, and how much they made up!

I don't know if you saw (maybe it's why you mentioned it), but there's a link to that effect in the article. Good stuff, too.

[Erstwhile]

Yes, it's a fantastic article, with all those old-time baseball game simulations that I had never heard of before!

And I read about the game simulations, and was replying with my own experiences of listening to them. Thanks for posting!