John Miley of Evansville, Ind. is about to become a very famous man. When he acquired a collection of recordings from an estate sale in 1981, he knew he had some thing special.
Miley purchased about 20 years worth of baseball games – recored to tape – for $10,000. As it turns out, the man who recorded the games was a dedicated New York sports fan. In fact, Patrick Rispole was perhaps the most dedicated fan of them all.
Between 1957 and 1979, Rispole recorded about 10,000 baseball games involving the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees, Giants and Mets, according to the Daily Gazette of Schenectady, NY.
The collection of games includes the Dodgers last game in New York, a Sandy Koufax no-hitter in 1962 and the Mets first World Series.
And now, those recordings will be preserved by the The Library of Congress. On Wednesday, Miley donated a portion of the collection plus thousands of his own recordings.
The library plans to digitize the recordings and make them available online. Giving every avid baseball fan a reason to thank John Miley of Evansville, Ind..
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