Play (OTR) Ball! Baseball on the Radio

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Does listening to Joe Buck make you scream things that rhyme with "Joe Buck Pershelf"? Then thrill away your weekends to the soothing sounds of PaperHandS Old Time Radio Recordings: actual live calls of hardball games from the '50s-'70s, put onto CDs by a Fort Worth couple so into America's pastime they actually got married at Cooperstown -- where husbands are barred from laying their new wives down in a bed of Pete Roses. Accumulated through swaps with fellow OTR enthusiasts who haven't become shut-ins for fear that the Shadow knows what evil lurks in their hearts, each CD set comes with a color-scan of the original program, for match-ups such as:

Astros vs Yankees, Apr 9th, 1965: Harry Kalas, Loel Passe, and Gene Elston's voices (as transmitted over our own KRLD) narrate the action as Mantle and Maris take on Staub and Spangler in an 11-inning epic that saw the debut of The Astrodome, which Billy Graham called the 8th Wonder of the World -- after which winning a pennant became like climbing Everest.

Mets vs Cardinals, Apr 11th, 1962: With Ralph Kiner, Bob Murphy, and Lindsey Nelson handling play-calling duties for WABC-770, the first-ever Mets game saw stars like Gil Hodges and Roger Craig (not to mention Stan Musial and Curt Flood for the Cards), and ended the way many a Mets game has since, with them committing three errors.

Yankees vs Brooklyn Dodgers, Oct 9th, 1956: Everybody remembers Don Larsen's perfect game, but the 10-inning Game 6 was just as momentous, featuring minor historical footnotes like Jackie Robinson's last hit, and the last day before Billy Martin told sobriety to go Buck itself!

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Play (OTR) Ball!

Published: November 17, 2011 at 4:00am EST

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