Charlie Danrick, a radio enthusiast in suburban New Jersey, owns tapes of 2,000 complete games. He tapes hundreds of games a year; the rest he gets in trades with collectors around the country. His stockpile goes back as far as the third game ofthe ‘36 Yankees-Giants Series, when Joe DiMaggio was a rookie and Red Barber a young announcer. (For a catalog, send $2 to Box 1347, Clifton, N.J. 07015.)
Danrick, 54, grew up listening to the voices of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the likes of Barber and Vin Scully. While he got his first reel-to-reel at 14, it wasn’t until 1985 that he discovered the tapes he collected were marketable. Now officially licensed by Major League Baseball, Danrick sells several thousand each year. Why do people want to listen to three full hours of a game they already know the outcome of? “It’s no different than reading a whole novel rather than a Reader’s Digest condensation,” he says.
In the off season, Danrick spends 12 hours a day holed up in a second-floor bedroom surrounded by receivers and recorders-and a lot of dated pennants. Here, on low-tech equipment, he makes his copies and fills the orders. “Other collectors offer people cards and the balls and the bats,” Danrick says. “I give them the memories themselves.
