Nat Allbright

Nathan Matthew "Nat" Allbright (November 26, 1923 – July 18, 2011) was an American sports announcer who specialized in doing play-by-play radio broadcasts of games that he had never seen, using information sent using Morse code from the stadiums where the games were played to provide listeners with vivid recreations of the actual games, in which Allbright would describe each pitch and play, combined with sound effects to make the depiction more vivid to listeners. Allbright was hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers to announce recreated games played away from Ebbets Field to a network of radio stations on the East Coast that included more than 100 stations, providing facsimile coverage of 1,500 Dodgers games, despite never having seen one in person.

Early life Allbright was born in Dallas, Texas on November 26, 1923.

Allbright maintained notes and pictures in his studio of each National League ballpark to help make his descriptions as vivid as possible. Allbright himself supplied the voice of the beer vendor, leaning away from the microphone to simulate the voice coming from the stands. In a 1955 article, sportswriter Red Smith described how Allbright never claimed to be broadcasting from Ebbets Field, but didn't make it clear that he wasn't, "kind of leaving it up to the listeners to decide for themselves."

After Fred Saigh, then owner of 90% of the St. Louis Cardinals, was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to 15 months in federal prison in January 1953, Allbright was part of a group of prospective buyers that sought to buy the team from Saigh. A month later, Saigh sold the team to a group led by the owners of Anheuser-Busch, accepting a lower offer of $3.75 million to keep the team in St. Louis.

From 1950 until 1961, Allbright did 1,500 broadcasts of games played by the Dodgers, though he never saw the team play in person. He was survived by his wife, as well as by a daughter and a son.