There are baseball books about ballparks, and ones about broadcasters. What author Kirk McKnight has done here is to fuse the two, getting broadcasters who know the parks well to describe them and the players and dramas that have enlivened all 30 current major-league stadiums, as well as some from the past.
Here’s an excerpt from The Voices of Baseball:
“Serving as perhaps the largest ‘halfway house’ in history, the Los Angeles Coliseum was the home of the Los Angeles Dodgers for five seasons; once there, the Dodgers resumed a trend they had just begun back in Brooklyn: winning. Just four years after their triumph over the New York Yankees and the team’s first ever World Series title, the Los Angeles Dodgers, awaiting their home on another side of the valley, beat the Chicago White Sox in the 1959 World Series. Dodgers hall of fame broadcaster Vin Scully, who came as part of the ‘package deal’ with the team, describes his brief residence in the site that once hosted the 1932 Olympics: ‘When I finally came out to Los Angeles, we had left the small confines. The noisy but very warm Ebbets Field. We came out to Los Angeles and the first thing I learned is Los Angeles County is something like 490 square miles. I remembered Gertrude Stein, who said about Oakland, “There’s no there there,” and I wondered where the “there” was in Los Angeles. Well, the Coliseum became our home. That would be from 1958 through 1961. So, while we were working in the Coliseum, the transistor radio came upon the scene, and, all of a sudden, I not only had the confidence of having eight years under my belt, but I found that I would talk directly to the crowd in the Coliseum and I would get reactions from the crowd. I had the crowd singing happy birthday to an umpire, and because of the transistor radio, we had a wonderful rapport with the fans. Not one on one, of course, but it was close in the sense I was talking directly to them.'”
