Collecting memories, play by play

by Joe Mock and Erin Slinde
All rights reserved

This article originally appeared in USA TODAY Sports Weekly. It’s re-printed here by permission.

The emptiness of baseball’s offseason is eased by the springtime sounds of the sport, especially the familiar voice of our favorite broadcaster. Opening Day 2020 was scheduled for March 26, but COVID-19 has forced it into May — and that’s the best-case scenario.

John Miley CREDIT: ED BROSCHKA

So how can fans get the play-by-play fix they need?

John Miley, 89, of Newburgh, Indiana has toiled for seven decades to keep the sound of baseball alive. He can’t offer live sports, but it’s the next best thing — sometimes better. And it’s not recordings of the games from the last few years that have been shown ad nauseam on all the sports channels recently. No, they are audio recordings of sporting events going back a century.

As a youngster growing up in Southern California, his love affair with sports began when he attended a college football game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Making an impression on Miley “was a young halfback by the name of Jackie Robinson, running all over the field for UCLA,” he recalls.

This prompted a passion for listening to sporting events on the radio, eventually recording them using a device that captured sound on wires. “My father knew I wanted it really badly, so he bought me a wire recorder for $160. That was like a million dollars at that time. I mean, I was getting a dime a week for allowance.”

The year was 1947, and he would sit by the radio with a microphone, waiting for something interesting to happen. “I did it with the idea that I would have something to do when I retire. Can you believe I’m a junior in high school thinking about retirement?”

Seventy-three years later, at an age when most people have been retired for a couple of decades, his collection has grown to over 42,000 entries. Sports fans should thank him for preserving the sounds of so many games that would otherwise be lost to history.

Indeed, a young Bob Costas, then an employee at KMOX-AM in St. Louis, was thankful for Miley. The two worked out a swap, supplying each other with recordings of Cardinals games that the other lacked. “As a result, we’ve had a tremendous relationship,” Miley explains.

In recent years, other broadcasters have borrowed clips from Miley’s collection and played them during their own broadcasts. Others have simply enjoyed listening to games from decades ago. The Texas Rangers’ Eric Nadel, like Costas a Ford C. Frick Award winner, says he finds recordings of yesteryear’s broadcasters invaluable “because I like to add different phraseology to my announcing. I look for new and various ways to describe things.”

The start of a massive collection

Initially, he recorded only highlights from games, “keeping only the ones that I knew I would want to re-listen to.” Eventually he decided to start recording complete games, keeping ones where interesting events occurred. That meant that he only retained about one out of every 30 that he’d recorded, he estimates.

This was a pastime that he did by himself until 1977, when an article about him appeared in The Sporting News. His mailing address was provided, and he soon received a flood of letters from around the country and Europe. Many volunteered to record games in their local market, and a network of fans with tape recorders was born. “I had ‘em in almost every state.”

42,823 events

Aided by this network, Miley’s collection increased exponentially. He hired a programmer to create a database — dubbed Sports Tracker — of his recordings. He loves to be asked how many events are in his collection, because with a quick look at his computer, he can tell you: 42,823.

“If you want to know what I have for a player or a team, for any sport, just name it. I have it,” Miley boasts. If you ask how many of the recordings feature Hank Greenwald as the broadcaster, Sports Tracker provides the answer: 188.

He seldom fills requests for recordings anymore because “I’m too dog-gone old to worry about doing these crazy orders.” He does maintain a printed catalog that details each game, the date, which teams were involved, even the broadcaster whose voice is heard. He notes, “I don’t like to put a game in my catalog that I don’t feel that I would like to listen to again.”

That 20-page listing includes nearly 1,000 different sporting events, 816 of which are baseball games.

All-time classics

Included are such gems as the 1934 All Star Game in which Carl Hubbell, sporting a devastating screwball, struck out five future Hall of Famers in a row. Graham McNamee, the premier broadcaster at the time, was at the microphone.

You’ll also find Game 6 of the 1920 World Series. How was this possible when radio broadcasting was in its infancy? The game was faithfully “re-created” in the 1940s by Gordon McLendon and Jerry Doggett using sound effects. Naturally, Miley recorded it.

Comparing eras

“I would much rather hear a game in the 1940s or early ‘50s than I would today,” he explains. “There’s no question the old-time announcers knew how to announce a game, and the ones today, well, most don’t know how.”

When asked to list the broadcasters he likes to listen to, he says quickly, “Let’s start with my favorite. I bet you’ve never heard of Bill Stern, have you? Back in the 1940s, everybody who knew anything about sports knew Bill Stern.” He’s known for broadcasting the first televised sporting event, a college baseball game in 1939. In 1942, Stern played himself in the movie “The Pride of the Yankees.”

Miley adds that he loves recordings of Harry Caray during his years with the Cardinals, which was 1945-1969. “He was unbelievable.”

Preserving for all of posterity

While sports fans may feel anxious about a virus that has wreaked havoc with the baseball schedule, they should appreciate the hundreds of thousands of hours that John Miley has spent preserving the sounds of the National Pastime.

Robert Dizard, Jr. was the Deputy of Library Services at the Library of Congress in 2006. When he heard of Miley’s collection, he became determined to land it for the Washington, DC institution.

In 2011, Dizard’s dream became a reality, when 6,000 of Miley’s oldest recordings became part of the permanent Recorded Sounds collection at the Library. Their literature refers to it as “the largest and most significant collection of sports broadcasts in America.”

You, too, can enjoy

Fans longing for radio play by play can obtain audio recordings from Miley’s vast collection. Through Baseball Direct, you can purchase CDs with baseball broadcasts from the re-created games in the 1920s to full games from the 1990s.

As Nadel points out about Miley, just one year shy of 90, “his lifetime’s worth of work has probably kept him young.”