Includes personal stories from such announcers as Joe Angel, Jerry Coleman, Ned Martin, Jay Randolph, Phil Rizzuto, Ned Singleton, and Bob Wolff Curt Smith takes a stunningly simple idea and executes it in an obvious format: assemble the Homers of baseball and let them rip. The result is an oral history of the game delivered with the crispness and color of the voices in the broadcast booth whose day--and night--job is to bring us the game. There are giants at work here: Mel Allen, Jack Brickhouse, Curt Gowdy, and Ernie Harwell. There are newer voices, too--Bob Costas, Tim McCarver, and John Miller among them--but The Storytellers truly belongs to the sounds of the past brought into the present. Allen on Mickey Mantle is wonderfully stirring, as is Gowdy on Ted Williams. Funny when it wants to be, and poignant without forcing nostalgia, The Storytellers is a bit like coming home, turning on the radio, and hearing the comfortable and exuberant sounds of childhood passion. The writing is a reminder of why, in an era of cold corporate ownership and player greed, the game survives in the heart and somehow endures.