Saturday, February 6, 2010
You've heard it going around. Here's that expletive-laced radio interview with Baltimore Orioles managing great, Earl Weaver:
What's the back story? Is it real? I really wish it had aired. Sadly...partially real: Weaver's prank tape is still ripe, decades after leaving tomato patch
...Yesterday, when Marr finished his morning show on WCBM-AM, he called me - "Let me tell you how it happened ... " - and popped the balloon.
"It never actually aired," Marr said. "It was never meant to air."
Marr said it was a prank. Marr and Weaver were pre-recording a segment from Seattle in 1982, when the pair flubbed a take of the Manager's Corner. They got to laughing and decided to record an entire fake segment and send it back to the station engineer as a joke.
The dialogue was all off-the-cuff and off-the-air. Weaver didn't have to try very hard to act like an old cuss. The engineer, of course, got a kick out of it, and the listeners heard a different, sanitized version of the segment before Sunday's ballgame.
The prank tape didn't die, though. It was kicked around Baltimore on audiocassette for years, and naturally, when YouTube was born, colorful Weaver made the jump into the digital age.
"It's been all around the world by now," Marr said. "Just grown like ivy."
Earl Weaver Baseball 1.5 was the best computer baseball game evah, btw.
