Baseball on the Radio

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!