The Old Bailgame

NOT long ago America seemed umbilically attached to baseball. Hitting fungoes, citing batting averages, trading a dozen Red Sox playing cards for a dog-eared Mickey Mantle—young males thought of little else.

“In our youth,” recalls NBC’s Bob Costas of the Fifties and early Sixties, “baseball was everything.” By day, my friends and I forged pickup games. At night, we turned to baseball the way a heliotrope turns toward the sun. Traversing the dial, you heard Mel Allen and Curt Gowdy and Lindsey Nelson and Ernie Harwell. Each of these Voices affirmed baseball as the finest game in the land.

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Curt Smith

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NOT long ago America seemed umbilically attached to baseball. Hitting fungoes, citing batting averages, trading a dozen Red Sox playing cards for a dog-eared Mickey Mantle—young males thought of little else.

“In our youth,” recalls NBC’s Bob Costas of the Fifties and early Sixties, “baseball was everything.” By day, my friends and I forged pickup games. At night, we turned to baseball the way a heliotrope turns toward the sun. Traversing the dial, you heard Mel Allen and Curt Gowdy and Lindsey Nelson and Ernie Harwell. Each of these Voices affirmed baseball as the finest game in the land.