Ebbets Field!" Allbright maintained notes and pictures in his studio of each National League ballpark to help make his descriptions as vivid as possible. An assistant sitting outside his recording booth would take details from the play by play feed and prepare a script listing the details of each half inning. Allbright would be notified of any gap in game play so that he would be able to stretch out the material with added commentary until the typed sheets needed for the next half inning were completed. Using the information transmitted about each pitch from the ballpark, Allbright would provide a running account of the game, using his knowledge of the players and their individual characteristics and quirks to provide a running color commentary for a game he could not see. Most of the sound effects he used were from recordings, though he had a knack for using dental clicks to simulate the sound of a ball being struck by the bat. He used records and tape recordings of the National Anthem, crowd murmurs, roars and jeers to help maintain the verisimilitude of the broadcasts, though sportswriter Leslie Timms of the Spartanburg Herald-Journal would reminisce that he could never figure out why the same vendor was shouting "Cold Beer, Here" regardless of which stadium the Dodgers were playing in. Allbright himself supplied the voice of the beer vendor, leaning away from the microphone to simulate the voice coming from the stands. If transmissions were not received from the live game, he might add in improvised foul balls; extensive lags could be turned into an imaginary rain delay to buy additional time, with thunder simulated by crinkling a piece of cellophane. In a 1955 article, sportswriter Red Smith described how Allbright never claimed to be broadcasting from Ebbets Field, but didn't make it clear that he wasn't, "kind of leaving it up to the listeners to decide for themselves." After Fred Saigh, then owner of 90% of the St. Louis Cardinals, was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to 15 months in federal prison in January 1953, Allbright was part of a group of prospective buyers that sought to buy the team from Saigh. A month later, Saigh sold the team to a group led by the owners of Anheuser-Busch, accepting a lower offer of $3.75 million to keep the team in St. Louis. From 1950 until 1961, Allbright did