After the Boys of Summer Have Gone
When nothing is at stake, September baseball on the radio offers its own unique comforts.
This first appeared last week on my Substack, Unsorted but Significant.
“America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”
— Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), “Field of Dreams” (1989)“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti, commissioner of baseball, 1989
THE LITTLE RADIO CRACKLES, and a distant ballgame echoes. Granted, “distant” in this case is about 10 miles away on Pittsburgh’s North Side, but sometimes it arrives from as far away as LA or San Diego or Seattle.
As I write this, it’s a Friday evening in mid-September and my lifelong baseball love, the Pittsburgh Pirates, are 70–76 with just over two weeks of games left in the 2024 season. They are steadfastly hurtling toward an 8–3 loss to the Kansas City Royals — a game that is entirely irrelevant (except to the Royals).
I am listening on a transistor radio that is perched on the ledge of the deck outside my house. I am surrounded by the trees that have been the backdrop to much of my life since birth. Dusk is falling.
On the radio, for the Pirates, nothing that happens tonight matters. All around the little machine, though, it all matters. Everything feels perfect — in a vaguely melancholy, summer-ebbs-into-fall sort of way.
Two things that I have always loved: baseball on the radio and baseball in September. There is a unique appeal to September baseball when your team is out of contention and nothing can be done to change that until at least next spring.
In these bleak, generally postseasonless times — of which Pittsburgh has seen far too many during recent decades — the baseball season becomes its own liminal space, its own invisible republic.
And the tiny plastic radio on my deck — which I choose consciously over streaming my phone to a thunderous Bluetooth speaker — serves as a tinny, vaguely mystical pipeline to that ephemeral and far-off land.
THE RADIO
“I watch a lot of baseball on the radio.”
— Gerald R. Ford, president of the United States, 1974–77
THE CLIPPING ABOVE comes from the 1977 Radio Shack catalog, which I located online and found — to my absolute delight — that the exact radio my parents bought me for my birthday that year was shown.
This was the badass multiband radio that I spirited under the covers in my room each weeknight to listen to Pirate games — unbeknownst to my parents, who many years later informed me that such activities were, in fact, very much beknownst and silently sanctioned.
In those days, on KDKA-AM, I listened first to Bob Prince and Nellie King and then to Milo Hamilton and Lanny Frattare — unless there was no game, in which case I used that very powerful radio to pull in games from Cleveland, Detroit, even occasionally Chicago. As an 11-year-old kid, I was passionate enough about Hamilton — who left Pittsburgh in relatively short order and was not at all beloved — to write, in his defense, a rather impetuous letter to the editor that was the first thing I ever had published.
Today, and for many years, the voices on the radio for the Pirates late in the season are Greg Brown, Joe Block and Bob Walk. Brown’s ideally calibrated voice and seemingly infinite baseball knowledge, honed over many years, surely will echo across the decades in my sons’ heads. It is the Pittsburgh Pirates personified.
And though Brown does a lot on the TV side, he is on the radio this particular weekend. In the waning September days of an uneven and ultimately dispiriting season, his voice still crackles with optimism, excitement and deep love for the game.
Why is radio different when it comes to baseball? For us in Pittsburgh, it’s special because KDKA, the first commercial radio station in the world, was also the first to ever broadcast a big-league baseball game on Aug. 5, 1921.
But it’s far more than regional. Baseball on the radio vs. on TV is like the difference between a book and its movie version. There are many blanks, some of which the announcers fill in with their curated choice of what intricacies to convey. And the rest? You fill it in yourself. The more you know about the game, the better the radio broadcast can be.
Maybe you’re doing something else while you listen — cooking, gardening, reading, appreciating where you are, absorbing your surroundings. Or maybe you’re totally focused on the action. Whatever the case, games on the radio contain a storybook quality. You are part of the game but you’re not. There is an intimacy to the distance, a romance that comes from hearing far-off action across the airwaves — a version of what Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), in “Deadwood,” called “messages from invisible sources.” What you’re not seeing on a screen — and screens are so plentiful these days — you’re seeing clear as day in your mind’s eye.
Some people thought that when he said he watched a lot of baseball on the radio, Gerald Ford wasn’t making any sense. I think he got it exactly right.
SEPTEMBER
“For many in baseball, September is a month of stark contrast with April, when everyone had dared to hope. If baseball is a lot like life, as pundits declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning.”
— John Thorn, official historian of Major League Baseball
THE SEASONAL BEACHGOERS went home after Labor Day. School has started pretty much everywhere. The days are getting shorter, and Halloween decorations are already crowding the aisles of the Dollar Tree.
Yet in towns across the land — towns where no playoff plans are percolating, where no dreams of postseason heroics are brewing, there is still baseball, its games continuing well after the cold facts of numbers offer no way forward.
There is much talk, usually in February and March, about baseball being a metaphor for hope — the possibilities that spring brings, the blank slate that it offers after a cold and dark winter. Sometimes the metaphors are deployed to venerate cadence and American continuity. As Terence Mann said in “Field of Dreams,” baseball marks the time.
But in September, something a bit different bubbles underneath the surface of the metaphors of hope and continuity. There is something about a slow end, playing out game by game, that is oddly comforting. “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” Yogi Berra famously said, but with all respect to his idiosyncratic wisdom, those of us in Pittsburgh in mid-September are certain that it is otherwise.
That’s what, to me, makes it all so satisfying. When the standings are too desolate to consult, when the losses run into the double digits and the end is near, somehow a clarity emerges.
You absorb the game in a different way, as if you’re watching two teams that don’t matter to you. You notice things that don’t always register — nuances in the pitching, little hits and outs that remind you of other little hits and outs of seasons past. Loss-leader baseball in September is like a reduction sauce, bringing out nuanced flavors that the high volumes and bright lights of a pennant race — or even a wildcard race — tend to drown out.
Lou Reed once recorded an album called “Magic and Loss.” It’s about both of those concepts, and deeply personal. It comes to my mind on this night as my radio crackles and the Pirates lose again.
The loss I am contemplating, though, is a larger, more diffuse kind than just baseball. It is the loss that comes with impending endings, drawn out though they may be. This kind of loss unfolds pitch by pitch, inning by inning, game by game, and you know where it’s all headed. But as the quiet end approaches, you learn to live within it and, perhaps, find places where enjoyment and peace are tucked away.
It’s not that I welcome loss. Not at all. It’s that, as I get older and experience more, I find that I can excavate the landscape of loss and, on the best nights, perhaps find the magic within.
MAGIC AND LOSS
“There are only two seasons: winter and baseball.”
— Bill Veeck, Jr., owner (at various periods) of the Cleveland Indians, the St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, my father used to read me an obscure story called “The Golden Key,” by a writer named James Street. It follows a young boy in a rural Mississippi town in 1912, trying to keep up with September baseball in the days before radio.
Like so many stories about baseball, it wasn’t really about baseball at all. Set in late September, it was about endings and loneliness and loss, and the realization that the arriving 20th-century world was far more vast than a small child in a small town could quite fathom.
At the end of the story, the baseball season ends and the boy is left alone when his adult friend leaves town.
“I knew that pretty soon the boys would forget about the World Series and … it wouldn’t be any fun anymore. On top of that, Mr. Hill was gone and I didn’t have anybody to play with.”
So maybe your team is going absolutely nowhere this postseason. So maybe James Earl Jones is dead and his sonorous voice will never again utter anything about the joys of baseball. So maybe the days are getting shorter and the twilight is coming earlier and what Joe Block last weekend called “the roller-coaster ride that is a baseball season” is creeping to its end.
I submit to you: Even with all of that, this is still a magical time in baseball. Enjoy the next couple of weeks as your team goes gentle into that good night. Pay close attention. Look for magic in the loss. You might just discover something precious in the gloaming. I did.
© 2024 Ted Anthony. All rights reserved.
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