Jim Britt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jim Britt (April 11, 1910December 31, 1980) was an American sportscaster who broadcast Major League Baseball games in Boston, Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio, during the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in San Francisco, California.

On June 15, 1948, Britt was at the microphone on WBZ-TV for the first telecast of a major league baseball game in New England, as the Boston Braves defeated the Chicago Cubs, 6-3, at Braves Field.

From 1940 through 1950, with time out for United States Navy service in World War II, Britt was the voice of both the National League Braves and the American League Boston Red Sox, as the two teams broadcast home games only. Because the MLB schedules were then arranged so that the two Boston clubs were never home on the same date, there were no schedule conflicts. As such, Britt was the voice of two pennant-winning clubs, the 1946 Red Sox and the 1948 Braves. At the close of the 1950 season, that arrangement ended and each team decided to air a full schedule of 154 games. Britt chose to stay with the Braves, and the Red Sox were left to look for their own #1 announcer.

As fate would have it, the Sox would hire the second-banana for the New York Yankees — a Mel Allen protege named Curt Gowdy — who would be Voice of the Red Sox for 15 years before moving on to NBC's Game of the Week and a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame as a Ford C. Frick Award winner. Meanwhile, the Braves' attendance fell disastrously in 1951 and 1952, and the club moved to Milwaukee during 1953 spring training.

Britt did not accompany the Braves to Wisconsin. Instead, he joined the TV announcing crew of the Cleveland Indians in 1954, working through 1957 with Ken Coleman, a native of the Boston area (and Gowdy's successor as Voice of the Red Sox). The highlight of Britt's Cleveland tenure was the Indians' 1954 American League pennant, although they lost in four straight games to the New York Giants in the 1954 World Series.

Britt participated in both the 1948 and 1950 World Series radio broadcasts, and worked on television for the 1949 and 1951 World Series. He also announced the 1951 baseball All-Star game and the 1953 Sugar Bowl football game.

He returned to Boston in the late 1950s as a sports announcer for the city's ABC affiliate, then WHDH-TV, which also telecast Red Sox games. But Britt never regained his former role on Red Sox broadcasts. Instead, he initiated a popular candlepin bowling show that he would host until the late 1960s.

Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.