I welcome the migration of the radio broadcasts of Chicago Cubs games to WBBM-AM 780 from WGN-AM 720. That probably puts this 92-year-old among a tiny minority of Cubs fans.
From 1929 to 1940, I listened to Pat Flanagan broadcast home games from Wrigley Field and recreate the play-by-play of Cubs away games on WBBM.
According to author Margot Morrell, Flanagan’s studio engineer even used recordings of ballpark music and crowd noise to replicate the crack of a bat and thud of a baseball slamming into a mitt for away games.
The broadcaster translated the ticker tape of a home run into: “It’s going. It’s going. It’s GONE!”
Bob Elson broadcast only Cubs and Chicago White Sox home games from 1928-1941 on WGN. However, he often did World Series broadcasts for the network and narrated the official World Series films from 1943 to 1948.
Elson’s perks puzzled me. The Sox usually finished near the bottom of the American League then, while the Cubs won National League pennants every third year — 1929, 1932, 1935 and 1938.
When I recently searched “WBBM Pat Flanagan,” I learned that — though probably greatly outnumbered — I was not alone in preferring Flanagan. Ronald Reagan, who called Cubs games for an Iowa station, told a biographer his favorite baseball announcer was Flanagan.
In her biography of Reagan, Morrell said that “mere mortals sat in stadiums and called games, but WBBM’s Pat Flanagan — with a beguiling brogue — recreated baseball games based solely on the sketchy information passed to him by a telegraph operator.”
— Brad Bradford, Highland Park
