Tales from Exit 22&lt!—-&t;.

Wednesday, June 20, 2001

Tales from Exit 22

Every year, my mother would give me a gift subscription to The Sporting News for my birthday. In those days, The Sporting News was a weekly newspaper-like publication that covered all sports, but it featured baseball.

It had a lot of news, stories, cartoons and photographs relating to baseball, but what made the weekly arrival of The Sporting News a much waited for event in our house were the box scores. The Sporting News not only contained the box scores of all the major league games, but it also ran those of a number of minor league tilts. Often it was more fun reading the box score than it was watching the game on TV. Besides, if a guy was lucky, he could see one baseball game on TV each week.

I loved the Falstaff Game of the Week with Dizzy Dean and either Buddy Blattner or PeeWee Reese as Dizzy’s partner. Dizzy was always getting into trouble for saying things like, &uot;He slud into third.&uot; It was brought to the viewers by Falstaff Beer and it featured commercials starring the &uot;Old Pro&uot; a likable, but bumbling cartoon figure. In 1965, there were only 28 games on national TV.

The lack of televised games was OK with me – I liked listening to the games on the radio. Radio brought my imagination into play. Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Einstein was a very smart man, so who could argue with him? After all, people are studying old Albert’s brain. You have to be pretty smart for people to want to do that. Listening to the radio was magic and brought me voices from all over the country describing baseball games. I rarely missed a game that the St. Louis Cardinals played. I had never been to St. Louis. I doubt that I had ever even been to St. Paul yet when I started listening to the Cardinals. I’ve still never been to St. Louis.

We had a big, old wooden radio in the dairy barn. It was one of those radios that had about 39 knobs on the front of it. Only two of them had any function -&160;the knob that turned the set on and off while doubling as the volume control and the knob that allowed the listener to tune the set to the station of his or her choice. I would find KMOX of St. Louis on the dial. Its frequency was 1120 and it advertised itself as &uot;the Sports Voice of St. Louis.&uot; It covered a wide area as its signal reached 44 states and three countries. I loved to listen to the wonderful announcers on KMOX -&160;Joe Garagiola, Jack Buck and Harry Caray. Many a day, I tried to picture the play that caused the effusive Caray to bellow, &uot;Holy cow!&uot;

I listened to so many baseball games in that old barn that even our Holstein milk cows became fans of the Cardinals. Music was said to help the milk production of the cows, but I can’t say that listening to baseball games helped it any. I ran the battery down in many of our old cars -&160;we were always the last owner of every vehicle we ever owned -&160;listening to ball games on the car radio while waiting for my parents on a shopping trip to town.

Radio made the listener use his or her imagination, but not like reading the box scores did. I would read the box scores -&160;at bats, runs, hits, runs batted in, doubles, triples, home runs, innings pitched, walks, strike outs, double plays, hit by pitch, winning pitcher and losing pitcher. They even told me what the attendance was. I could almost see each pitch being thrown and hear the crack of the bat. In my mind, I could hear the roar of the crowd after each play. Reading a box score is like reading a good book. It tells a fine story, complete with a beginning, a middle and an end. I may have been living in my own little world, but that was OK. They knew me there.

I still read the box scores whenever I get the chance. I can still hear the crack of the bat in the newsprint. Box scores have had a great

impact on my life. Box scores helped me develop an imagination and math skills of a sufficient quality that I could figure batting averages. I even decided that it was time for me to get reading glasses when I began to have difficulty reading the box scores.

Hartland resident Al Batt writes columns for the Wednesday and Sunday editions of the Tribune.