My interest in baseball has waned. I do not think I have stopped caring about the game itself. I am tired of the way baseball is presented today.
I am tired of the overhyped, noisy shit surrounding it. Every moment has to be sold as important. Music blasts between pitches. Scoreboards flash instructions telling people when to cheer. Broadcasters manufacture excitement. Gambling odds crawl across the screen. There are sponsored replays, sponsored pitching changes, sponsored statistics and endless attempts to grab my attention. The people presenting the game no longer seem to trust baseball to hold an audience on its own.
That is why I want to listen to the Atlanta Braves play the New York Mets on July 9, 1967.
If you are expecting me to explain why this game mattered, I cannot. It did not matter. It was a Sunday afternoon game at Shea Stadium between a fifth-place team and one of the worst teams in baseball. It was the last game before the All-Star break. Nothing historic was supposed to happen.
That is exactly what interests me.
I do not want someone telling me that I am about to hear an unforgettable game. I do not want a dramatic documentary score preparing me for the decisive moment. I do not even want to know who won. I want to put the recording on and allow an ordinary baseball game to occupy the room.
But before I listen, I want to understand the day.
Sunday, July 9, 1967, was warm, cloudy and hazy in New York. Weather observations from nearby LaGuardia Airport show that the temperature reached about 83 degrees after a morning low of around 71. There was heavy cloud cover but no measurable rain. It was not a beautiful summer afternoon with a bright blue sky. It was warm, gray and probably a little uncomfortable.
Air conditioning was still uncommon in many homes. People opened their windows, pulled down the shades and sat in front of electric fans. The subway could be miserable in July. Kitchens became hot. Children became restless. Adults got tired of being around one another.
That afternoon, 17,730 people went to Shea Stadium.
The attendance number means more to me than the score. Who were those people? Where did they come from? What had happened in their homes that morning? Why did they decide that sitting in a mostly empty baseball stadium was better than staying home?
There is no way to know, so I have to imagine them.
Some probably attended church before taking the No. 7 train to Shea. Some fathers brought their children because it gave them something to do for a few hours. There were couples on dates, groups of friends, neighborhood kids and men who arrived alone with a scorecard and a transistor radio.
Some may have been escaping hot apartments. Others may have been escaping family arguments, household chores, loneliness or the knowledge that they had to return to work the next morning. A baseball game allowed a person to leave home without having to explain why he needed to leave.
A man could sit by himself at Shea without looking alone. He could keep score, listen to the radio, watch the field and occasionally talk to the stranger beside him. For a few hours, he belonged somewhere.
The people at Shea may also have wanted relief from what was happening outside the ballpark.
The Vietnam War was getting larger and harder to ignore. American troop levels and casualty reports were rising. Television brought the war into people’s living rooms. That weekend, readers of The New Yorker could encounter Jonathan Schell’s account of the destruction and forced evacuation of the Vietnamese village of Ben Suc.
Less than a month earlier, the Supreme Court had struck down state laws banning interracial marriage. President Lyndon Johnson had nominated Thurgood Marshall to become the first Black justice on the Supreme Court. Arguments about race, policing and inequality were building across the country.
Three days after this game, violence would erupt in Newark following the arrest and beating of a Black taxi driver. Detroit would erupt later that month.
The people at Shea did not know those things were coming. History does not provide advance notice. July 9 was simply another Sunday, and people still had to decide what to do with their afternoon.
There was lighter noise in the culture too. “Windy” by the Association was the biggest song in the country. The Beatles had released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a little more than a month earlier. Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” was everywhere. Newspapers were reporting on the Summer of Love in San Francisco.
The war, the music, the racial tension, the family arguments, the summer heat and the baseball game were all happening at the same time. That is the context I was looking for. I do not want the game separated from the people who attended it.
Shea Stadium was only four years old. It sat next to the grounds of the recent World’s Fair, with the Unisphere nearby and airplanes approaching LaGuardia overhead. It could hold more than 55,000 people, so a crowd of 17,730 would have left most of the stadium empty.
That emptiness is part of the appeal.
There would have been room to spread out. People could change seats. Children could move around. The crowd would not produce the roar of a pennant race. It would produce a steady background murmur made up of conversations, vendors, public-address announcements, transistor radios and thousands of small reactions.
The Braves entered the game with a record of 42–38. The Mets were 30–47 and already seventeen and a half games out of first place. The Braves were starting Ken Johnson, who was 8–4 with a 2.73 earned-run average. The Mets were starting Jack Fisher, who was 6–9 with a 4.40 ERA.
There were great players on the field. Hank Aaron entered the game batting .325. Joe Torre was batting .308. Tommy Davis was also hitting .308. Ed Kranepool was at .313, and Bud Harrelson was at .270. Aaron and Torre were going to the All-Star Game. The Mets would be represented by a 22-year-old rookie pitcher named Tom Seaver.
Yogi Berra was coaching first base for the Mets. One of the most recognizable players in baseball history, a three-time Most Valuable Player with ten World Series championships, was standing in the first-base coaching box during a game that practically nobody remembers.
Even Yogi Berra could become part of the background.
That is how I want to experience this game. I do not need to analyze it. I do not need to understand every managerial decision. I do not need to keep track of the score. There is no point other than allowing the game to play in the background while I read, work, clean, drive or stare out a window.
The voices make that possible.
Lindsey Nelson had been broadcasting Mets games since the team’s first season in 1962. By 1967, Mets fans knew him. They trusted him. His Tennessee voice was warm, intelligent and patient. He did not have to pretend every pitch was historic.
Nelson understood that baseball had room for silence, conversation, humor and ordinary time. He could tell listeners what was happening without demanding that they stop everything else. If someone left the room and returned ten minutes later, Lindsey would still be there, calmly guiding him back into the game.
That is why people listened to him.
His voice could accompany someone washing the car, sitting on a porch, preparing dinner or driving with the windows open. He was not only describing a baseball game. He was keeping people company.
Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy were part of that Mets broadcasting team too. Kiner brought the perspective of one of the greatest home-run hitters of his generation, along with stories, verbal mix-ups and a personality that never sounded manufactured. Murphy had an unmistakable baritone that made even an ordinary inning sound welcoming.
These became iconic voices because listeners spent so much time with them. They were invited into kitchens, automobiles, workshops and bedrooms. People did not only hear them during important games. They heard them during thousands of innings when almost nothing happened.
The recording itself is constantly noisy. There is the wash of the crowd, the announcers talking, vendors somewhere in the distance, the crack of the bat, the stadium public-address system and the electrical hiss of an old recording. Even when the game becomes quiet, the recording never becomes silent.
But that noise feels completely different from the noise surrounding baseball today.
Modern noise is designed to grab me. The old noise simply existed. It does not order me to pay attention. It lets me decide when I want to listen closely and when I want to drift away.
The commercials are part of the experience. They tell me what people were buying, how companies spoke to their customers and what advertisers believed an American family should want. The announcers move naturally from the game into the advertisement and then back to the field. The commercials are not interruptions anymore. They have become little historical documents.
The recording is not perfect. There is hiss, distortion, uneven volume and probably a few places where the signal weakens. I do not want those flaws removed.
That is what makes the recording beautiful.
It is similar to why I enjoy film photography. The grain, scratches and imperfections remind me that something physical captured a particular moment. A perfectly cleaned digital recording might make the words clearer, but it would also remove some of the distance the recording traveled to reach us.
The hiss tells me that this survived.
Nobody involved in the broadcast believed they were preserving an important day. The announcers were doing their jobs. The players were trying to reach the All-Star break. The spectators were spending a cloudy Sunday afternoon at Shea.
After the final out, those 17,730 people went home. They returned to their apartments, families, jobs, problems and newspapers. They carried no understanding that people might listen to their afternoon nearly sixty years later.
That is what I want from this game.
I want to spend a few hours in an ordinary day before anyone knew what the rest of the summer would bring. I want baseball without artificial urgency. I want announcers who do not shout at me. I want a game that is allowed to become background noise.
My interest in baseball may have waned, but perhaps I am not tired of baseball. Perhaps I am tired of being told how excited I am supposed to be.
This old recording asks nothing from me. It does not care whether I listen to every pitch. It does not insist that the game is historic. It does not need me to place a bet, check a statistic or react to a graphic.
It simply plays.
Anyone interested in hearing games like this can explore the Classic Baseball Radio Broadcasts collection at the Internet Archive. YouTube also has collections from Classic Baseball on the Radio and Retro Sports Radio.
Be careful with video titles, descriptions and comments because they often reveal the result. I do not want to know who wins before I listen. In this case, I am not sure I need to know afterward.
The result is not the point.
For a little more than two hours on July 9, 1967, 17,730 people found somewhere else to be. Lindsey Nelson, Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy kept them company.
Now they can keep me company too.
