1930s Radio Broadcast Transcript

Mode B — Source date 1950 or later (time-traveler)

He is in our century but keeps his 1930s voice and vocabulary. The humor and charm come from the translation: a Depression-era voice describing a later-era game fluently but in his own words. He is informed — he has been here a while, he's been briefed — and he knows what Statcast, Sabermetrics, ABS, replay review, and the pitch clock actually are. But he lacks the native language for them and reaches for period-accurate analogues (tabulating machines, Signal Corps apparatus, photoelectric cells, cinematograph review, the slide-rule school, the log-book boys).

• The announcer occasionally marvels — in character — at modern phenomena: the size and speed of modern players, velocity readings unheard of in his day, night baseball under the lights. A light touch, not a bit every inning. The further from his own era (2020s vs. 1960s), the more he has to reach.
• Modern player names used as-is — Moncada, Trout, Tatis Jr. He can say them confidently.
• Modern technology and concepts are translated, not avoided. See references/translations.md for the full vocabulary table. Examples:
  • Statcast → "the Signal Corps tracking apparatus" / "the Bell Labs boys with their radio-ranging gear"
  • ABS → "the electric umpire" / "the photoelectric strike zone"
  • Sabermetrics → "the slide-rule school" / "the number men" / "the IBM-tabulator fellows"
  • Replay review → "the cinematograph review" / "the newsreel confab" (never "video review")
  • Exit velocity → "the off-the-bat reading" / "the tracking tells us"
  • Pitch clock → "the electric pitch timer" / "the chronometer"

Mode C — Source date before 1921 (no radio baseball yet)

Baseball radio broadcasting did not meaningfully exist before August 1921 (KDKA's Pirates-Phillies broadcast). For a game from 1920 or earlier, tell the user you can't produce a "live radio call" for a game that predates baseball radio, and offer alternatives: (a) a period-newspaper wire recap via mlb-game-report, or (b) a "what it would have sounded like if radio had existed" broadcast with that caveat front-and-center in the transcript. Don't silently produce a live-radio call for a pre-1921 game.

Always (all modes)

• LIVE PRESENT TENSE. This is a radio broadcast happening right now, as the game unfolds. The announcer does not know what happens next until the ball is hit, the pitch lands, the umpire rules. Default voice is present tense: "He swings — he misses — strike two!" / "Cronenworth steps in" / "Schanuel is digging in the box" / "Here comes the pitch" / "That ball is jumping off the bat — deep to center — going, going, gone!" — not "Moncada homered" or "Schanuel went 3-for-5". Past tense creeps in easily; be vigilant. Between-innings recaps and the post-game sign-off may use past tense for earlier events, but live plate appearances are always live.
• The source date is the masthead date. Never substitute a different year.
• Computers do not yet exist in his vocabulary (1930s: a "computer" was a person). Avoid the word and its descendants: no "computer", "algorithm", "data", "software", "app", "stream". Prefer "tabulating machine", "records", "the books", "the wire service".
• Facts from the source, voice from the references. Every play, count, score, umpire name, pitching change must match the source.
• Sparse sources (historical games where the source report lacks detailed PBP) → produce a highlights-style broadcast that walks through the line-score innings and scoring plays, rather than pretending to call every batter. Make this mode explicit to the listener: the announcer is summarizing rather than live-calling. Use "our correspondent at the park has wired us…" / "we gather from the press-box wire…" as cover — and even in summary, keep the core calls in present tense when describing a specific play ("Thomson hits one deep" rather than "Thomson hit one deep").

Tense rules in detail

• During an at-bat (live): present tense. "Soriano comes set." / "Here's the pitch — ball one, outside." / "Moncada digs in." / "He gets all of it!"
• Describing ball flight: present progressive or present. "That ball is going, is going — gone!" / "High fly to right — Tatis races back — he's at the warning track — at the wall — off the top!"
• Immediately after the play resolves: present perfect or simple past for the just-finished action, then back to present. "That's a base hit through the hole. / Trout scores from second. / Neto stands at first." Keep moving forward in time.
• Between-innings recaps: past tense is allowed for recapping earlier innings. "Soriano set 'em down in order in the first. / The Angels plated three in the second on that Moncada poke and the Frazier double."
• Closing sign-off: past tense is fine for the game-wide summary.
• Atmospheric color: present tense. "The sun is just slipping behind the grandstand" — not "the sun slipped". "The flags hang limp" — not "hung limp".

When to use

Triggers:

• "give me a 1930s radio call of [game]"
• "Red Barber version" / "Graham McNamee version" / "Bill Stern style"
• "vintage announcer transcript" / "old-time radio broadcast"
• "make [report] sound like a 1930s broadcast"
• "narrate the [team] game like it's 1935"

How to use

1. Find the source report. The skill expects a game produced by mlb-game-report, under ~/games-attended/. Each game has two co-located artifacts:

   • The dataset directory: ~/games-attended/<slug>/ containing game.csv, plays.csv, pitches.csv, batting.csv, pitching.csv, linescore.csv — this is your primary data source.
   • The rendered Markdown: ~/games-attended/<slug>.md — useful for the precomposed ATMOSPHERE narrative (sunlight arc, weather phrasing) and KEY TAKEAWAYS, but not the primary source of facts.

   If the user hasn't specified a game, list candidate slugs with ls -d ~/games-attended/*/ and ask which one. If they reference a team + date, find the matching slug.

   Backward compat: if only a .md exists (pre-refactor report with no dataset directory), fall back to parsing the Markdown sections — the old trigger phrases and structure still work. Consider suggesting the user regenerate via mlb-game-report so the CSV dataset is available; the transcript will be more accurate.

2. Read the CSV dataset first (primary data). The CSVs are structured rows — far cleaner than regex-parsing the .md.

   File	What's in it	How the announcer uses it
   game.csv	1 row: gamePk, date, teams, venue + coords, weather, wind, attendance, WP/LP/SV, records, attended metadata, captivating_play_idx	Masthead, dateline, AT-A-GLANCE setup, moment-of-game lookup key
   plays.csv	1 row per plate appearance: idx, inning, half, batter, pitcher, event, event_tag, description, balls, strikes, pitch_count, away_score_after, home_score_after, is_scoring_play, captivating_index, rbi	The call-by-call skeleton — walk through in order
   pitches.csv	1 row per pitch, joined to plays by play_idx: pitch type, speed, spin, EV, LA, distance, trajectory, hit location, hardness	Statcast embellishment on big ABs — translate via translations.md
   batting.csv / pitching.csv	1 row per player who appeared	Starting lineup intros, pitcher bios, decision tags (W/L/S)
   linescore.csv	1 row per inning + R/H/E summary	Inning-by-inning context, between-innings recaps

3. Consult the rendered .md only for narrative text you want to borrow. The .md ATMOSPHERE block has a precomposed sunlight-arc phrase ("Late-afternoon start — sun still up at first pitch, setting at 7:24 PM; middle innings slide into dusk. Full dark around 7:50 PM.") and a one-sentence HOW IT HAPPENED. Both are handy to weave into the call. Don't re-parse the .md for play-level facts — use the CSVs.

4. Optional — extra color via the MLB MCP. The announcer loves an aside, and the MCP gives him things to chew on that aren't in the dataset. Use sparingly — one or two per broadcast, woven into natural pauses (between batters, mid-inning lulls, after the moment-of-the-game). The dataset CSVs remain the authority on what happened; MCP data is garnish.

   Tool	In-character usage
   mcp__mlb__search_player → mcp__mlb__get_player_bio	Birthplace and handedness for featured batters/pitchers. "A left-hander out of Bluefield, West Virginia — not often you find 'em built like that down in the coal country."
   mcp__mlb__get_player_stats (season or career)	Contextualize a performance. "That makes thirty-one round-trippers on the summer, which if the log-book boys have it right puts him one clear of his mark from a year ago."
   mcp__mlb__get_stat_leaders	League leaderboard placement. "Eight whiffs tonight — the tabulating fellows tell me that's good for fourth in the junior circuit."
   mcp__mlb__get_standings	Post-game pennant-race line. "With tonight's verdict the club sits two and a half back of the front-runners — ground to make up, ladies and gentlemen, but the calendar's on their side."
   mcp__mlb__get_transactions (around game date)	Roster-move explanations. "You'll note a fresh face behind the dish — called up from the farm club just yesterday, according to the wire." For IL activity: "back from the sick bay" / "off the hospital list".
   mcp__mlb__get_team_info	Venue history / franchise factoid for scene-setting.

   Period vocabulary for MCP-sourced facts: IL/injured list → "the sick bay", "the hospital list"; transactions wire → "the roster wire", "the teleprinter"; leaderboard → "the batting ledger", "the circuit's pacesetters"; standings → "the pennant chase", "the standings as the log-book boys have 'em"; call-up → "up from the farm", "fresh off the minor-league train".

5. Load the style references. Before writing, read these in order:

   • references/style-guide.md — era voice, rules, and structural conventions
   • references/vintage-phrases.md — period vocabulary catalog to draw from (don't copy-paste; use as inspiration)
   • references/translations.md — how to translate modern baseball tech/analytics (Statcast, ABS, sabermetrics, replay review, pitch clock) into period-accurate 1930s framings
   • references/example-calls.md — worked examples of how to transform PBP+Statcast into live-radio calls

6. Compose the transcript (see "Output structure" below). Write to ~/games-attended/<slug>-broadcast.md — next to the source .md and dataset dir. For the April 17 Angels game, that's ~/games-attended/2026-04-17-padres-at-angels-broadcast.md.

7. Offer HTML. If the user said "open it", "make HTML", or similar, render with pandoc using the bundled stylesheet:

   pandoc --from=gfm+yaml_metadata_block+smart --to=html5 --standalone \
          --wrap=preserve \
          -V document-css=false --metadata title=" " --metadata lang=en \
          OUT.md -o OUT.html
   

   Then inline scripts/broadcast.css into the <head> (strip pandoc's default <style> block first, same trick as the mlb-game-report renderer does).

Output structure

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