As the World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers starts this weekend, I thought it’d be appropriate to share some baseball podcast episodes I’ve recorded for your listening pleasure. We’ve done A LOT of baseball-themed or baseball-linked programs over the past sixteen years. Detectives such as The Saint, Bulldog Drummond, and Boston Blackie have all had baseball-related capers. So this is not an exhaustive list by any means.

Snacks:

My latest podcast, the Old Time Radio Snack Wagon, features bite-sized podcast episodes and we’ve already featured some baseball-related snacks.

Of course, we’ve featured Abbott and Costello performing their famous “Who’s on First” sketch.

Then, we also played an episode of The Adventures of Babe Ruth, a series dedicated to the most iconic player who ever lived. A man so larger-than-life that he inspired this series of fictitious and fictionalized adventures.

Most recently, we featured a rare 1947 interview of the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio, by a group of teenage baseball players from New York’s Police Athletic League.

Detective Stories:

In the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio, the number of episodes that have some baseball tie-in is quite high. However, not every episode features a Baseball Hall-of-Famer, and in honor of both of this year’s World Series teams, we have shows featuring both a Yankee and a Dodger Hall-of-Famer.

In “The World Series Crime,” Ellery Queen is called in to find a star baseball player’s lucky bat before the start of a World Series game. Ellery Queen featured a panel of “armchair detectives” who would hear all the evidence that Ellery was provided and then guess at the solution before the radio audience was told who did it. One of the armchair detectives was Yankee second baseman and reigning American League MVP Joe Gordon. Gordon would go on in a few weeks to win the actual World Series that year.

Of course, Gordon didn’t act in the radio play. However, Dodgers legend Jackie Robinson did make a radio acting appearance in an episode of The Adventures of the Abbotts, in which Pat Abbott tries to solve the murder of a baseball catcher.

Of course, if you don’t care about Hall-of-Famers or your traditional baseball detective boilerplate stories, you might want to check out one of my favorite oddball episodes. It’s the only surviving episode of the New York anthology series The WOR Summer Playhouse. It’s a little story entitled “The Mystery Of The Perfect Throw From Left Field And The Conga Dancer’s Aunt.” It’s a quirky story about a part-time “clownpire” who can also play detective (and don’t even start to ask him about his day job).

Miscellaneous Baseball Old Time Radio

During the spring of 2020, when the Major League Baseball season was on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I did my bit to alleviate baseball fans’ hunger with a six-week mini-series. I’ll highlight three of these.

Gary Cooper stars in The Lux Radio Theater adaptation of his classic film Pride of the Yankees, where he plays all-time baseball great Lou Gehrig, whose greatness on the diamond was only matched by his courage and class in dealing with the tragedy that ended his baseball career and would eventually cost him his life.

Destination Freedom was a Chicago-based Golden Age radio series that told the stories of Black Americans. In “The Ballad of Satchel Paige,” the series tells the story of one of the game’s all-time greats and larger-than-life figures with appropriately epic musical accompaniment.

Finally, a bit further removed from reality is the X Minus One story “Martin Sam.”  Now, X Minus One isn’t alone in imagining sci-fi baseball. In the 1990s, I watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which often came back to the game, with it even being played on the Holodek. The Klingons, Bajorans, and Ferengi were similar enough to humans that they could easily play the game. However, Martian Sam asks what if we encountered an alien completely different from us, and he wanted to play baseball, and it was impossible for humans to beat him.

Conclusion

Whether you’re wanting to hear the voice of one of the game’s greats, relive a great story or hear a far-out adventure involving a Conga Dancer or an alien from outer space, I hope you’ll find these enjoyable listens, either in between games or when you get hungry for baseball in that long season when true fans are waiting for pitchers and catchers to report to spring training.