If you were like me as a kid you replayed some of the greatest moments of baseball in your back yard. Or you even created your own great moments. You were everything…the batter who hit the winning home run, or the pitcher who threw the winning strikeout. You were the announcer calling the action; you were the roar of the crowd as well. Thanks to my good friend Jeff Wilder, I found a website where you can relive some of the greatest moments in baseball history.
Meet Steve Contursi. He’s a teacher from New York who grew up a big Yankees fan, but he’s also a fan of the great game of baseball. So, one day he got the idea to create a website with some of the game’s greatest calls. What started out as just an archive of 15 or so calls has now turned into over 500.
Yes, while he is a Yankees’ fan and there are several calls on the Bronx Bombers, there are also other great clips including Jack Buck’s call of Ozzie Smith’s homer in the 1985 NLCS. He’s got clips of Mark McGwire’s home runs, even the New York broadcast of George Brett’s famous Pine Tar Game.
What caught my attention is Contursi’s audio of his experiences at major league ballparks across the country. During the summer when Contursi is not teaching, he’s traveling checking out major league and minor league games. He brought a recorder with him and has the starting lineups and seventh inning stretch festivities from several ballparks. What I noticed was the clarity of the P.A. announcer with the background noise of fans.
Well, Steve Contursi admits his websites are difficult to find on the web, since he’s not well versed in HTML, but I’ve linked his website for the Sounds of Baseball as well as his website Ballparks Across America.
Plus, click here to hear more on why Steve got this idea and how he went about finding all of this great audio. Enjoy the Podcast.
