Red Sox, the Radio and Pink Houses

I love baseball. We watch football, enjoy hockey and like basketball but in this family we love baseball. When I was a young boy the Red Sox would be on perhaps on the weekend afternoons when the local affiliate would pick up the Boston broadcast. Then in the later seventies when cable came we lived too far out to get it and the jealousy we felt for those fortunate enough to watch TV38 out of Boston was immense.

Now we can see every game on NESN. Recently in the last couple of years we have even started getting the baseball package which allows you to see every game. It is a baseball junkie's dream.

Still and I tell my sons this to no avail, they cannot picture it, that nothing is better than the game on the radio. I love baseball on the radio. I also have XM radio and of course they offer every teams local radio broadcasts. Hearing the local flavor of the announcers, even local commercials makes every game interesting.

Of course the MLB baseball package does the same thing as the Colorado Rockies commercials featuring Carlos Gonzales chowing down at some local Taco joint showed over and over last year.

Radio was how we listened to the majority of the games growing up. This is something the kids do now only if we happen to be traveling somewhere in the summer and their Nana wants us to find the game on the radio. Listening to Joe Castiglione, he of the " It's a pop up " call with such a level of disgust and disappointment you fear him jumping off a bridge is like going back in time to my childhood of listening to Ned Martin.

We would have the radio on at camp when I was a boy. I remember in 1976 when the Sox were double digits out of first place at the All Star break hearing my Uncle Walter say that they had come back to their level and we would not see them in the World Series again anytime soon. Walt was a diehard fan but like many of that era he knew better than to believe. I loved Carlton Fisk at the time but he would tell me he was always getting hurt and that Juan Beniquez, that guy was a comer. We still joked about Juan 25 years later when last I saw him before he died.

I can even remember the sponsors of commercials of my childhood radio Red Sox. I clearly remember Amilee motor oil and I might be misspelling that but I do remember. I would take a radio to bed and listen and summer nights on the West Coast would stay up later than I was supposed to. I remember what spell back in what might have been 77 or 78 when three home runs in one inning, I know Butch Hobson hit one of them led me to turn my flashlight on and twirl circles across the ceiling with the light in celebration until my Dad walking by from some middle of the night trip down the hall suggested I go to bed NOW.

Radio allowed you to make the pictures in your mind. If I allow myself to the different situations and memories can come flooding back. The most clear and consistent memory however is of some neighbors of ours when I was growing up.

About 5 houses down was a little pink house with some older gray haired gentlemen brothers who lived with just each other and their dogs. These men loved the Red Sox. I can remember just like yesterday each and every evening after everyone was in bed, the windows open for any breeze that might stir and you could hear the broadcast of the Red Sox game from their house. I do not know why they had it so loud but it was just a background sound for the whole neighborhood. When my parents would insist I turn off my radio you could strain to hear if not the words the inflection of Ned Martin's call. And if you were fortunate enough to hear " Mercy" from old Ned you knew you could sleep with good thoughts of a Red Sox win.