Few things beat listening to a late night baseball game on the radio

'Will the Thrill' on the cover of SI.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed listening to ballgames on the radio, especially baseball.

While fancy set-ups like satellite TV and XM radio are nice, I’ve always preferred a car radio or a good, old-fashioned clock radio that plugs into the wall. To me, nothing beats finding a game on one of these devices and following the action miles away.

That’s why, if you were to peer into my living room at night, you might find me leaned over my reliable Sony radio, slowly moving the tuner along the AM dial, searching for a game in progress somewhere out there in the wide world.

During the day, you won’t find much of anything on the AM dial, but at night, you can pick up signals from all over the country. I don’t know what has changed in recent years, but it seems like those late night signals aren’t as strong as they used to be, but on some nights, when the weather is just right, you might be surprised by some of the games you can catch on the radio. Sometimes, I’ve even picked up signals from as far away as Mexico.

All of this reminds me of when I was a kid, way back in the days when I was a shaky-voiced eighth-grader enthralled with Major League Baseball.

During those days, my favorite team was the San Francisco Giants and my favorite players included Will Clark and Kevin Mitchell. You may remember those teams from the early 1990s, teams that included the “earthquake” World Series team that faced cross-bay American League rivals, the Oakland A’s, in some classic games.

When I was growing up, my family didn’t have cable or satellite TV. We had three TV channels, that is, Channels 3, 5 and 10, just the major networks. For those of us living down below Red Town, there was no ESPN, no TBS, not even WGN out of Chicago. To keep up with sports, it was either catch the nightly news, pick up a Mobile Press-Register on the way to school or listen to the radio.

I can remember lots of nights, lying in bed in the dark with my then-fancy Sony alarm clock-radio on my chest. The cord would run off one side of the bed to the plug in the wall, and the only light in the dark room would be the devil red glow of the numbers on the clock’s display.

With a little practice, I got good at slowly moving the radio’s tuner along the AM dial, and there in the bedroom, in a house in the woods outside of Frisco City, I could pick up signals from radio stations hundreds of miles away.

On a good night, I could pick up Rangers games in Texas, White Sox and Cubs games in Chicago and Braves games in Atlanta. Often, I would hear the ends of games that would wrap up too late to make it into the paper the next morning. At other times, I’d fall asleep and wake up hours later to the crackling sound of static on the radio with no idea who won or lost.

Even today, I’m still guilty of roaming the AM dial late at night or while driving somewhere after sundown in my pickup truck. For whatever reason, those AM signals don’t seem as strong as they used to be, but the allure of those late night games remains strong. I’m almost 40 years old now, but when I close my eyes and listen to some late night baseball game on the radio, I can’t help but feel like a much younger version of myself.