Jay Mohr, the comedian who appeared in one of the most underrated SNL sketches ever— How Much Ya Bench? starring Emilio Estevez— used to have a bit in his standup act about how guys will watch Sportscenter over and over. I try not to fall prey to stereotypes, but I’m absolutely guilty of this.
It goes back to my childhood. I’m sure part of it was the novelty effect. We lived out in the country and didn’t have cable. Neither did my grandparents on my dad’s side, which is where I spent a lot of time growing up. But my grandparents on my mom’s side did. So whenever I was at their house, especially if I was spending the night, I had to take full advantage of their access to ESPN. MTV, Nickelodeon, TBS, WGN, and other stations.
On summer mornings, while I waited for the dew to dry on the grass so I could go outside and stage my own games, I poured myself a bowl of cereal and sat down in front of the television to watch all the highlights of the previous night’s games on Sportscenter. And then, when the hour turned over, if I wasn’t ready to go outside yet, I watched them all over again on the Sportscenter repeat.
The fact that I had already seen them didn’t enter into the equation. First off, it was baseball, so how could that get old? Second, it wasn’t like I was watching intently the whole time. Between eating breakfast, leafing through my binders of baseball cards, planning my day’s events and whatever else might come up, I only had to keep a casual eye on the TV. If I missed something, it was no big deal. I’d catch it the next time around. I might even channel surf a bit during the commercials, and if something caught my eye and I didn’t make it back in time, it didn’t matter. Although, if ESPN threw an episode of Baseball Tonight into the mix, well, that might require my full attention.
Baseball Tonight and Sportscenter were two of my favorite shows growing up, for the reasons I’ve just outlined, but they both owed a tremendous amount to an even better show that came before them— This Week in Baseball.
This Week in Baseball was the ultimate show for baseball addicts like young me. Hosted by the incomparable Mel Allen and featuring not one, but two iconic theme songs, it had a little bit of everything. But perhaps its greatest selling point was that it aired in syndication, which meant that even backwards country folk like myself could watch it, whether I was at home or on my grandparents’ farm.
That’s why the show was so omnipresent in my life. Sportscenter and Baseball Tonight were only on the table at one of my grandparents’ houses, and maybe my cousins’ place. But This Week in Baseball was everywhere. Not only did WGN and TBS regularly use it as a lead-in to Cubs and Braves games, and a time-filler during rain delays, but NBC aired it regularly as a prelude to its Game of the Week every Saturday. This is when I most regularly watched it. For a young me, it provided a seamless bridge from Saturday morning cartoons to baseball.
Unfortunately, CBS declined to carry on this tradition when they took over the national Game of the Week in 1990. They also didn’t show a national game every week of the season, opting to hold off on regular broadcasts until later in the season. Unfortunately, Fox continued this practice when they eventually took control of MLB’s rights, but T.W.I.B. was still shown every Saturday on Channel 41 where I lived.
No matter where I was, after I watched the show, I would head outside with my head full of the latest goings-on in baseball. If I was in town at my Grandpa Murray’s, I’d throw the ball up and play a game by myself in the yard. If I was home, I might do basically the same thing, except instead of playing a whole game, I might just act out the kind of highlights I’d just seen on T.W.I.B. Our yard was less ideal for playing baseball. And if I was out at my Grandpa Glancy’s farm, I’d throw a ball up on the slanted tin roof of his barn and act out highlight reel catches when it came rolling off the side.
I’ve never been a great impressionist, but if I could have emulated Mel Allen’s voice while acting out those highlights, I would have done it in a heartbeat. I have no doubt that his dulcet tones were bouncing around inside my brain anyway. Mel Allen was the host of the show, and once the final notes of the show’s opening song, “Jet Set,” faded away, he was in charge and our guide to all things baseball.
A quick aside before we get into Mel. I mentioned earlier that T.W.I.B. had two iconic theme songs, and I wasn’t exaggerating. Both are instant classics and immediately recognizable to anyone who ever watched the show. The opener, “Jet Set,” was written by Mike Vickers, a former member of Manfred Mann. (If you just started singing “Blinded by the Light” at the mention of Manfred Mann, I don’t blame you.) The song featured an energetic start-stop tempo and set the mood for a fast-paced show that quickly bounced from segment to segment.
The closer was titled “The Gathering Crowds.” Written by John Scott, it was more orchestral and had a majestic feel to it as it built to a crescendo over the credits. To a young me, who had very little exposure to more refined culture, it sort of put me in the mood of “Pomp and Circumstance,” which was the intro music for the “Macho Man” Randy Savage. So yeah, we’re talking classy stuff.
The final credits were accompanied by both “The Gathering Crowds” and still shots of MLB highlights. These often alternated between the previous week’s top plays and snapshots taken from the most iconic moments in the sport’s history. These were the same moments that often fill pre-game introductions to this day, especially during the postseason, so it’s hard to say for sure, but I will go to my grave believing that the T.W.I.B. credits were my first exposure to many of baseball’s biggest moments. This is especially true of highlights that I didn’t actually live through, like Carlton Fisk attempting to wave his home run fair as he bounced down the first baseline in the 1975 World Series.
But back to Mel Allen. I was tempted to include him in my list of the five best announcers in the PBN era. The only problem was that I never actually heard him call a game. Don’t get it twisted though. He’s every bit a part of the baseball soundtrack of my life, just as much Vin Scully, Harry and Skip Caray, and Royals announcer, Denny Matthews. I just never had the pleasure of listening to him do play-by-play.
Mel Allen was a great broadcaster though. He got his start with CBS in 1937, and one of his first gigs was covering the Hindenburg disaster. A year later, he called his first World Series, which led to him becoming the voice of the Yankees.
There’s a great story from his first full year in the Yankee booth, 1940, which was one year after Lou Gehrig was forced to hang up his cleats. Allen ran into Gehrig in the dugout, and Lou told him that he’d never been able to listen to him call a game before, because he’d been playing. Now it was the only thing keeping him going. Allen was so moved by the praise, he waited until Gehrig left the dugout and broke down in tears.
Unfortunately for Allen, he was inexplicably fired by the Yankees after the 1964 season. Well, it might not have been so inexplicable after all. He was probably let go as a cost cutting measure by Ballantine Beer, which sponsored the Yankee broadcasts and had been losing money for years. Allen eventually found his way back to the Yankees in a part-time capacity in 1976, but the Yankees’ loss was our gain. And Mel’s too.
A year later, Allen took over hosting duties on a new show called This Week in Baseball. Greeting fans every week with his trademark phrase, “Hello there, everybody!” Allen became an American institution. If that doesn’t sound like much of a catchphrase to you, well, you just have to hear it in Mel’s voice. It gives me goosebumps. And so does hearing him call a home run with “That ball is go-ing, go-ing, gone!” and his most well-known gift to baseball broadcasting, “How about that?” which he dropped whenever he presented a particularly fantastic highlight.
“How about that?” might be my favorite catchphrase in all of baseball history. Like many baseball fans, I’ve used it my whole life, whether I’m talking about baseball or not. It’s so ingrained in me that I bet when my wife reads this article, she’ll think to herself, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say that.” But I guarantee I’ve used it a hundred times. She just has no idea who Mel Allen is, and like I said, I’m terrible at impressions, so it probably wouldn’t make any difference if she did.
Allen was the straw that stirred the drink. His voice was deep and smooth, and he effortlessly guided the show from one segment to another with a natural manner that conveyed both a deep love of the game and a sense of humor. That last part can’t be celebrated enough. Baseball is a game. It’s supposed to be fun, and with Mel on the mic, it was. A lot of modern-day broadcasters could take a lesson from him.
Allen died in 1996, and This Week in Baseball continued on for two years without him before it was canceled. It was revived by Fox from 2000-11, but even though it ran for over a decade, it never really made the same kind of impact as its first incarnation. They had a number of different hosts, most of them forgettable, and used Mel’s soundbite for the intro to a segment called “How about that?” I hardly ever watched it. T.W.I.B without Mel Allen just wasn’t T.W.I.B. to me.
The absence of Mel Allen is not what killed This Week in Baseball, however. Even if Allen had still been around, its time had simply passed. By the late 90’s, Sportscenter and Baseball Tonight were cultural staples. The internet was ascending as well, and smartphones were soon to follow. People can get scores and highlights in an instant now. Just as it is no longer necessary for me to wait for the morning paper to comb through the box scores and standings to get up to date, a show offering a weekly recap of the sport’s best storylines is no longer necessary. T.W.I.B. is a relic.
But what an amazing relic it is! Sure, almost every element that went into it is readily available now in one form or another, but no place put them all together the way This Week in Baseball did in its prime. Guided by Allen’s narration, the show generally bypassed individual game highlights and opened with a detailed dive into the game’s biggest developments that week. These might include an underrated Cleveland team making a surprising run up the AL East standings, or the Angels going on a ten-game winning streak. That sort of stuff.
Then it could bounce around in a number of different directions. “T.W.I.B. Notes” was probably the most famous of these segments. It featured Allen spotlighting specific individual accomplishment and milestones, like no-hitters, grand slams, and broken records, and was often divided into two portions, one for the AL and the other for the NL.
Using pixelated 80’s graphics that were probably state-of-the-art for the time, the show transitioned and zoomed in on a variety of other features. These included player interviews and profiles, behind the scenes coverage, opinions from fans, instructional segments from major leaguers, minor league insights when it was merited, and bloopers. They also occasionally highlighted players from previous eras. I credit T.W.I.B. with my introduction to Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson.
And then there was the trivia. Introduced by what became yet another Allen catchphrase, “Now it’s time for this week’s quiz,” the regular trivia questions were one of my favorite parts of the show, even if I was ill-equipped to answer them correctly in my youth. I can’t say with certainty that my lifelong love of trivia can be traced directly back to T.W.I.B., but I’m sure it didn’t hurt.
Maybe the only thing I liked better than the trivia was when I caught a glimpse of the Royals on the show. It could be selective memory on my part, but it feels like the show had its favorites. I seem to remember a lot of Gary Carter on there, which isn’t shocking, considering his reputation for seeking out the camera, and Nolan Ryan. In fact, I specifically remember getting one of those pitching nets one summer, and every time I saw Ryan I was inspired to go outside and throw into it. Thanks to T.W.I.B., that net got a lot of use.
By the late 80’s, my team was on the downturn. This pretty much gave ESPN the greenlight to ignore the Royals, and it’s only gotten worse over the decades. They were certainly featured on T.W.I.B. a lot less than when I first started watching in the mid-80’s as well, but unlike ESPN, T.W.I.B. didn’t ignore them completely. Their mission was to cover baseball, so whether your team was contending for the pennant or dwelling in the cellar, they were bound to pop up eventually.
Whether it was a jaw-dropping Bo Jackson highlight or a themed episode like the one that covered the last day of the 1987 regular season through the perspectives of several players (and chose Kevin Seitzer as one of its subjects), it was always a thrill to see the Royals on there. Heck, even a still shot during the credits of George Brett hugging Bret Saberhagen at the conclusion of the 1985 World Series was good enough for me. It was a little much needed reassurance that the Royals still mattered, even if maybe they didn’t to anyone except me.
For that, and for so many things, I’m grateful to This Week in Baseball. If you ever loved it, or are just curious about what baseball was like in the 80’s and early 90’s, I suggest you check it out. Tons of episodes are available on YouTube and PlutoTV. Pick one out at random and dive in.
As a connoisseur of baseball nostalgia, I can say this without hesitation— there is no better time capsule available.
Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. Did you love This Week in Baseball as much as I did? Share your memories in the comments below.
The Astros uniforms of that era always stood out to me because so many teams were in the powder blue.
My Pavlovian response to hearing "Gathering Crowds" is to grab my glove and head outside. Unless the Royals will be on NBC Game of the Week. Mel Allen followed by Vin Scully! How about that?