Tonight, coming home from choir rehearsal, I searched the AM dial for the Orioles game, hoping to catch the last of the game as I drove back from Falls Church along a darkened Lee Highway. My usual station, SportsTalk 980 was broadcasting a basketball game, so I searched using the manual controls on my radio, the automatic controls being worth less than nothing this evening, and I could find no baseball. Stopped at the Texaco for some gas, I fiddled with the dial searching and searching for a baseball game, that telltale crowd noise in the background and the dulcet tones of the play-by-play man.

It came in slowly, as I pulled back onto the road, I could hear it just a little, I pulled into the left lane, hoping to escape the hum of the powerlines over my head. There it was, baseball on the radio, I could hear them talking about a breaking ball and the 1-2 count. Suddenly it was crystal clear, almost like FM radio, the static all gone as I crossed over Harrison just a mile from home. It wasn't the O's game. It wasn't the Pirates game, that we get every now and again off a lucky bounce of the radio waves.

It was instead WSB AM 750, as I heard the station identification call, which is the Atlanta Braves home station in Atlanta some 650 miles to my southeast. A miracle of that blessed radio-reflecting layer of our atmosphere known as the Ionosphere. A crystal clear night here in Washington, with clear, cloudless, moonless skies, the announcers came in clear from a good long ways away. When I heard them talking of Frank Robinson, I was afraid I'd slipped into some time warp where he was still playing for the Reds, hitting .323 the year they went to the Series in '61. Playing at old Crosley Field, a minute ballpark by today's standards, holding just 30,000 fans at capacity.

I hoped, dreamed that I was listening to the Reds in '61, for in that ballpark, or on the end of the radio somewhere out there, was someone I never met, and someone I know quite well.
10:07:38 PM  comment [ [Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "commentCount" hasn't been defined.] ]  #