Being a fan of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, I decided that recording my own audio drama would be the best use of my new gift. This goal proved elusive as well, casting and directing proved too challenging for my neighborhood recruits. It became clear that whatever product I was going to create, it was going to be up to me and me alone to make it entertaining.
I recorded hours of my piano playing on cassette tapes. My thoughts were that this was an priceless commodity but my friends weren't prone to spending their hard-earned cash on noise they could hear just by standing in my driveway. Then it hit me, the cash-cow secret to ensuring the flow of money from my friend's wallets to my bank account. Baseball games.
We all loved baseball. We would organize games, (as long as we had more than 4 players), and play for hours every day that we had free time. We listened to games on the radio and watched passionately on the television each Saturday afternoon during the game-of-the-week telecast. But what if I could take the box scores of games that weren't broadcast and re-create the game for my friends? That had to be worth their allowance, right? We subscribed to the newspaper so the box scores wouldn't be an issue. I had hit gold!
Let me stop right here and explain some hard-earned knowledge about producing baseball broadcasts. The special effects are not hard to duplicate, pretty inexpensive actually. But unlike football and basketball, the action does not dictate the broadcast. There is an delicate balance to a entertaining and educated soundtrack, and discovering the rhythm of the game was difficult to ascertain through the newspaper box scores. I started honing my skill by turning off the sound on the TV each Saturday and replicating the broadcast into my recorder. Crowd noise was an easy vocal sound effect, and the crack of the bat could be imitated by using stalks of celery hitting the top of an 1/2 empty paint can but one thing became glaringly apparent. Back stories. There just simply wasn't enough action to fill an 1 1/2 hour stretch of time without having access to stories about the players themselves.
Basketball, no problem. Football, maybe even easier. But baseball, its just not possible to generate an entertaining and money-parting product without access to the nuggets of information gleaned from years of interviews and access.
It was soon back to the proverbial drawing board for my money making ideas and my audio recorder.
