betmaster How to Fall in Love With Baseball

The hallmark of a great baseball radio announcer is knowing when to remain silent. That waybetmaster, the game speaks for itself. Near home base, a pair of parabolic dishes relay the smack of a catcher’s glove, the scrape of spikes on dirt and chalk, the fizz of the crowd. A crack of the bat, caught by a shotgun mic poking out the window of the booth, announces a home run long before the ball drops into the stands. There are many other microphones in the stadium — near the bases and along the outfield wall — but those are for television. Radio ears can handle only so much.

When you listen to baseball on the radio, you learn that there can be beauty in redaction, in going by only what you’re given. The late, legendary Vin Scully, who called games for the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles on both radio and television, renders the final inning of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game immortal via restraint. He describes Koufax taking the mound — “the loneliest place in the world” — with “29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies” surrounding him. Scully has you observe closely, at first — Koufax wiping a finger on his pants, tousling his hair, fussing with a cap. Then he goes wide, sending you into the crowd. After calling the last strike, he’s silent for 39 seconds.

Not every game is a perfect one, and dead air is usually dangerous. The listener needs to know what’s going on. Announcers are fond of painting metaphors, and their art is one of quick brushstrokes: calling fastballs from sliders while weaving in novelistic details that transform anonymous bench players into protagonists; a goofy joke if a mic near the dugout gets hot. But no one wants a motormouth. The game comes in and out of focus, just as it would if you could be in the stadium yourself. Certain moments nail your gaze to the field; others provide the opportunity to wander off in search of a kielbasa. Greats like Scully knew this.

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My grandmother listened to Scully call the Brooklyn Dodgers before they broke her heart and moved West in 1958. She was an Irish Catholic who professed to see spirits living inside you and whose leftist politics were forged in a household that sent envelopes of cash to the I.R.A. As a young woman in Albany, she approached baseball fandom as she approached everything else: with fervent devotion. It was not in her being to root for the Yankees. (Though it was for my grandfather, who listened to games in secret, turning them down whenever she came near.) She wandered until the Mets joined the league in 1962, adopting her scrappy underdog, her future heartbreaker. She fell in love with the voice of Ralph Kiner, whom she had watched play for Albany in the minors.

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