cool blog: April 2011

More on this clip: Baltimore Sun

"It never actually aired," Marr said. "It was never meant to air."

Marr said it was a prank. Marr and Weaver were pre-recording a segment from Seattle in 1982, when the pair flubbed a take of the Manager's Corner. They got to laughing and decided to record an entire fake segment and send it back to the station engineer as a joke.

The dialogue was all off-the-cuff and off-the-air. Weaver didn't have to try very hard to act like an old cuss. The engineer, of course, got a kick out of it, and the listeners heard a different, sanitized version of the segment before Sunday's ballgame.

The prank tape didn't die, though. It was kicked around Baltimore on audiocassette for years, and naturally, when YouTube was born, colorful Weaver made the jump into the digital age.

"It's been all around the world by now," Marr said. "Just grown like ivy."

So, yes, it was Earl Weaver, unscripted and uncensored. But it was stolen from a bottom drawer somewhere, not stripped from the airwaves.