there are certainly more long dead spots in baseball games than in most other sports (except, of course, soccer, which is all dead spot), and it’s not like you can just stop talking during them. And there are worse ways to fill them than with telling stories about old ballplayers for three minutes and then noting “Three up, three down, we go to the bottom of the seventh …”

Heh, I remember a game, somebody ripped a screaming liner down the first-base line with Willie Stargell playing first, and Prince said, “That one damn near took Stargell’s head off.” There followed silence of what seemed like and may have been a full minute (an eternity in radio time, of course) before Prince said, “Darn near. ’Scuse me.”

I’m surprised a lot more (and a lot worse) of that type of thing didn’t slip onto the air. My dad worked for Bell before the breakup, and way back in the day the broadcasts would be piped in over a telephone line, so the people manning the line could hear the game, and also the broadcasters’ chatter between innings while the station was airing the commercials. He said Prince had maybe the foulest mouth he’d ever heard. And my dad was in the Navy.

He was also a character, noted for wearing loud jackets and pulling stunts like diving out of hotel windows into swimming pools on a bet. Prince, not my dad.