Best Game Ever in Bing Crosby’s cellar – history and the analog hole

29 Sep 2010

Stories like the discovery of Bing Crosby’s copy of the previously lost Game 7 of the 1960 World Series are fun, and not totally uncommon. Earlier this year the National Jazz Museum acquired the Savory Collection of about 1,000 discs of radio broadcasts of jazz greats that had been recorded from radio broadcasts by an enthusiastic audio engineer, and a bootleg of a Woody Guthrie concert that surfaced a few years back is the only known recording of him playing live.

Crosby, the singer and movie, radio and TV star, had more foresight than the television networks and stations, which erased or discarded nearly all of the Major League Baseball games they carried until the 1970s.

Today Major League Baseball is notoriously strict about the rights to their games. It makes you wonder how much of this history we could lose as companies attempt to close the analog hole and average people lose the ability to record their media.