Radio Games Live On (Mostly)

“A broadcaster paints pictures on the minds of listeners.” — Vin Scully

Just a reminder—if you haven’t noticed buried in the feed—I post a full Game of the Week using Substack’s podcast feature. You can listen directly on Substack, or find it on Spotify. There’s no intro, no narration—just the full original broadcast of a baseball game from the past, the way it sounded when it first aired.

What continues to pull me in is how much of baseball’s radio history lives in these old games—and how much of it we’ve lost.

Most stations didn’t archive broadcasts. Tapes were reused, games were aired once and then erased, as if no one would ever want to hear them again. The idea of preserving them just wasn’t part of the workflow. Unless someone at home recorded the broadcast—often off a speaker using a microphone—there’s a good chance it vanished. Entire seasons, entire voices, entire careers drifted off the dial and into memory.

That’s part of why I post these. It’s also why I’ve been digging deep lately—reaching out to people who might have old recordings, whether they’re full games or just fragments. There’s a whole quiet world of collectors and archivists keeping this stuff alive, sometimes without even realizing how important it is.

I’m also on the hunt for something related but slightly different: those old vinyl records that teams used to put out. You might remember them—season recaps, highlight reels, narrated by the team’s broadcaster. They were sold at souvenir stands and mailed to fans who wanted to remember a season long after it ended. Some were polished, some were raw, all of them carried the same spirit: preserve the sound of baseball. I want to find those, digitize them, and start posting them too.

If you want to explore more broadcasts yourself, there are some great places to look:

• Archive.org – Do a deep search. Use team names and dates. There are full games tucked in under different labels.

• YouTube – Oddly enough, some of the best radio game audio has been uploaded here by anonymous heroes.

• OTR forums and private groups – There's still a trading community out there that quietly moves cassettes and reels between collectors.

• Game Logs (Baseball Reference) – These help if you’re looking for a specific moment. Date in hand, you can start the search for a matching audio version.

There’s something meaningful about this kind of preservation. We live in a time where everything is saved and nothing is sacred. These old broadcasts, by contrast, weren’t made to last—but when they do, they feel like treasure.

So when I post the Game of the Week, let it play. While you’re making dinner, sitting on the porch, or just letting your mind wander. These games still have something to say. The past isn’t gone—it just sometimes needs a little help being heard again.