It was 1921. Radio was young and WJZ (now WABC in New York City) figured out how to do a remote broadcast of the first-ever World Series game on radio. The combatants: the Yankees and the Giants (both local teams) were in the championship, a contest the station owners figured would surely boost interest in the still new medium.

The story behind those broadcasts is fascinating, including a virtual unknown calling the action. The way it worked - he was receiving relayed descriptions of what was going on in the field by a guy at the ballpark and putting them on the air. 

"Hunt relayed the plays by telephone to Cowan, who was lodged in a cramped 15-by-20-foot “contractor’s shack” atop Newark’s Edison plant, where the WJZ transmitter was located. In his calls of the games, Cowan simply parroted whatever Hunt told him – mind-numbing work that offered few breaks. 

After one exhausting game, Cowan reported he “couldn’t even collect [his] thoughts enough to tell who had won.” When a WJZ colleague asked him who won, he could only say, “I don’t know, I just work here.” 

Some other amazing facts - there were no commercials, owners were against the broadcasts because they worried it would hurt attendance and banned the broadcasts, until the League commissioner overturned the idea.

An amazing look back at the history of the game on radio that few of us ever knew. 

The humble (ad-free!) origins of the first World Series broadcasts