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What: “The Golden Voice of Baseball”

Author: Ted Patterson

Publisher: Sports Publishing, L.L.C

Price: $39.95

This 192-page coffee-table book is filled with biographical and anecdotal material on many of the legends who have broadcast baseball over the years. There also are fascinating photos and two CDs of historical calls and interviews of the announcers featured.

It’s all the work of Ted Patterson, a Baltimore sportscaster generally recognized as one of the foremost experts on sportscasting history.

Curt Gowdy wrote the foreword, and more than 35 announcers are featured. It’s noted that a member of the Brooklyn Dodger broadcasting team during the Jackie Robinson era was “a young kid from Fordham University who went on to have perhaps the greatest career of any sportscaster in history: Vin Scully.”

Some of the other men featured are Mel Allen, Red Manning, Russ Hodges, Harry Caray, Jack Buck, Red Barber, Jack Brickhouse, Lindsey Nelson and Ernie Harwell.

One of the most fascinating chapters is on Bill Stern, who was better known as a football announcer and for his national “Colgate Newsreel” shows. Stern never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

On one of his “Colgate Newsreel” shows, he said with a straight face that Abraham Lincoln had been on his deathbed in the boardinghouse across from Ford’s Theatre, after John Wilkes Booth shot him, when he summoned Abner Doubleday and whispered to him to invent the game of baseball.

Stern, who died in 1971 at 64, was often ridiculed by the press.

“I’ve got news for the press,” he said toward the end of his career. “I laughed all the way to the bank.... The press was basically jealous of radio guys because we made 10 times as much money and they felt announcers didn’t know as much about sports as they did, which is probably true.”

-- Larry Stewart