Hey, everybody, I'm Justin McGuire.

And this is Baseball by the Book, the only podcast that matters.

That's right, folks, you are once again listening to Baseball by the Book,

the podcast in which we talk to authors of baseball books past and present.

Today we are joined by James R. Walker, who's here to talk about Red Barber, the life and legacy of a broadcasting legend, which he co-wrote with Judith Hiltner.

Let's get started.

Hi, Jim, welcome to baseball by the book.

It's great to be here.

So I was looking at your biography before we got started here,

and I saw that a couple of your previous books include Crack of the Bat, a history of baseball

on the radio, as well as centerfield shot, a history of baseball on television. And of course,

the book we're here to talk about today is a biography of one of baseball's most legendary broadcasters,

read Barber. So the first thing I wanted to ask you is, what got you interested in this topic

of baseball broadcasting? Well, I think I read Kurt Smith's book when it first came out,

and that was very stimulating, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. And then as my career moved on, I began attending a conference with a good friend out in Arizona

every spring, the nine spring training conference.

And we started to do papers on baseball and what we knew because we were both professors of

mass communication.

And so television became a topic.

And we did a series of papers going all the way

back to the baseball network, if you can remember that one year adventure between baseball and television.

And we really got some good reception from that and nobody else seemed to be really working in the

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