A tape machine on a sideboard in Brooklyn, and a mother pressing record because her son was at work — that's the only reason the sound of 1951 exists at all. No network was keeping it; it wasn't anybody's job. Toby's got the count and the uniform number, and underneath all of it is Mrs. Goldberg maybe holding a microphone up to the radio speaker, and the room going down on the tape along with the call.
What did Branca throw before the one everybody knows? Went and looked. A fastball for a called strike, then he came back with the second pitch, and Thomson got it. 0-1 count. 5-4. Pennant gone. He wore 13, he was 25 that year, and he spent…
A home machine in 1951 was a Brush or a Webster sitting in a wooden case, 7.5 inches per second if you were lucky, and it cost about what a decent used car cost. Nobody in that room was engineering anything either — a microphone held up to the speaker grille, acoustic coupling, the room noise going down with it. That's why you can hear the room.
Bless her for pressing the button, Otis. Hodges always said he never planned a word of it — he was just hollering into a mic in 1951 and the tape happened to be rolling in somebody's living room in Brooklyn.