Broadcasting From a Cracked Dial

Northwoods Baseball Radio is a fictional play-by-play baseball broadcast made to help you fall asleep. It’s engineered to sound like an old AM station you caught by accident—soft voices, a little hiss in the signal, a crowd that feels more like memory than audio. That AM texture matters, because it smears the calendar immediately. The broadcast could be happening now, or decades ago, or in a town that never agreed to join the rest of time.

I’ve made it this far over the last year, barely, and I’m only on episode 14. My pace is a slow-motion ritual: 0.6x speed, ten minutes of listening, then sleep. The next night I rewind to find the seam where words stop being words and start becoming the raw material of dreams. One episode takes weeks. A season takes months. The show doesn’t move forward as much as it circles, patiently, like it knows I’ll come back.

The 0.6x Descent

Northwoods is calm in the way some places are calm right before you realize you shouldn’t be there. The announcer’s cadence is steady, almost kind. It counts pitches, names batters, and describes routine plays with the gentle conviction of someone keeping you company in the dark.

The repetition does something to me. A normal podcast passes through your attention once and is gone. Northwoods stays. It returns. I hear the same half-inning four nights in a row, and the details begin to deepen instead of fading. The broadcast becomes less like entertainment and more like a location I keep revisiting, each time noticing another small, wrong angle in the architecture.

Sleep makes you a bad witness. Rewinding makes you a just slightly better one. The two together create a peculiar kind of credibility. Things I might ignore at full alertness land differently when my guard is down. A strange line slips past my brain and hits my nervous system first. A joke takes three listens to reveal the hook inside it.

The Sponsors as Transmissions

The ads are where the broadcast stops feeling like a bedtime story and starts feeling like a signal.

They arrive with that cheerful, local tone—small-town businesses, familiar promotions, the steady voice of commerce doing its best impression of normal life. Then the content doesn’t match the promise. A video store that specializes in Betamax, plus some DVD-adjacent format I don’t think exists anywhere, in any decade. Products that feel pulled from different eras and pressed into the same sentence. Promotions that suggest the town is simultaneously behind the times and ahead of them, without the slightest embarrassment.

Northwoods doesn’t wink at the anachronism. It doesn’t flag it as a joke. It just keeps going, which makes the whole thing feel less like intentional comedy and more like a world whose timeline is being held together by polite narration alone.

The AM hiss starts to feel like a seam. The sponsor spots start to feel like they’re not interrupting the game at all. They feel like they’re leaking through it.

The House of Sleep, Whatever it’s Called

One sponsor has become my favorite recurring fracture: something I hear as “Ed Horton’s House of Sleep.”

The name never quite locks in. Horton. Hordon. Horn. Plus, the ad reader might be the owner, Ed, but, I can’t be sure which makes this next part especially weird. The syllables drift, and it’s hard to know how much of that is the show and how much is me, listening half-drowned in sleep. The uncertainty becomes part of the dread, because names are supposed to be anchors. Names are supposed to hold.

The shop sells rest. Mattresses, sleep products, comfort. The concept is perfect for a sleep podcast, almost too perfect, like the universe is trying to make a point with a straight face. Then the ad repeats with small variations, the way a dream repeats and swaps out one detail just to see if you notice.

Sometimes Beatrice (the owner’s wife) makes essential oils. Other times the voice says they “don’t have essential oils right now because… Beatrice is fine.” All with a slight error in the edit after “before” like they’re trying to hide something badly.

Beatrice is fine.

That was the moment I did a sleepy double take—one of those nearly-asleep jolts where your body reacts before your brain can articulate why. I rewound it the next night to confirm I hadn’t hallucinated it. The line was still there, delivered with the same calm reassurance, and that steadiness made it worse.

Nobody says that unless the universe has raised a question it refuses to answer.

The broadcast doesn’t slow down afterward. The inning continues. The announcer’s tone stays soft, almost tender, as if nothing happened. The sentence remains, though. It sits under everything that follows, quietly suggesting that comfort in Northwoods might be another product—something sold, rationed, temporarily unavailable.

Bill, Phil, and the Person Behind the Glass

The producer’s name seems to change. Bill. Phil. Bill again. Phil again. The swap happens with the ease of a misfiled memory. The show never corrects itself. Nobody laughs it off. Nobody explains. The broadcast behaves as if both names are equally true, or equally disposable.

That refusal to correct is where the dread starts to take shape. A normal story protects continuity because continuity keeps the world believable. Northwoods treats continuity like a minor preference, like the world can tolerate drift without consequence.

It starts to feel like the booth itself is unstable. It starts to feel like the person behind the glass isn’t one person at all, or maybe is a person only when observed. The name changes because the broadcast changes it, casually, the way it might change a sponsor read. The game continues anyway, as if reality is the thing that’s supposed to adapt.

Next Week, Forever

The timeline doesn’t just wobble. It breaks.

A new fictional baseball season begins. The broadcast marks it. New records. Fresh starts. The comforting structure of time turning a page.

Then an ad drops in that references a sale or event happening “next week.”

Except “next week” belongs to the old season. In-universe, the broadcast has advanced, but the sponsor spot speaks from an earlier “now,” insisting its future is imminent. It keeps happening, too. The same promise returns in the middle of the new season, still one week away, like the town can’t finish swallowing that particular chunk of time.

That’s when the show stops feeling like a quirky aesthetic and starts feeling like layered time laid bare.

The game time moves forward.
The sponsor time loops.
My listening time rewinds.

Those clocks don’t agree. The disagreement starts to feel like the premise.

“Next week” becomes a small-town version of eternity. The sale is always coming. The event is always about to happen. The future keeps arriving and never arriving. The broadcast keeps smiling politely while time quietly fails to resolve.

Comfort as a Mask, Routine as a Mechanism

Nothing in Northwoods sounds panicked. That’s the trick. The dread isn’t in what the voices say. The dread is in what the voices refuse to react to.

The show offers routine the way a lighthouse offers light. It keeps the cadence steady. It keeps the counts precise. It keeps the tone warm. It does all of that while the world underneath it subtly refuses to align.

Cosmic horror (and I’m not actually claiming Northwoods is cosmic horror. Maybe it’s subtle comedy, or both, or something stranger) usually gives you a monster. Northwoods gives you a structure. It gives you a town that feels slightly misfiled in the universe, like it got shelved between categories and never noticed. It gives you a soothing voice describing an ordinary play while reality gently slips its grip.

The show doesn’t feel haunted by a thing. It feels haunted by time itself—time reused, time misheard, time replayed, time insisting it’s “next week” forever.

The Models Change, the Broadcast Doesn’t Notice

This is where my year folds into the dread. the tools I use to write keep changing faster than I can finish a fictional season. Notes started in one model era get revised in another. The number on the tool updates. The world rushes forward.

Northwoods remains serenely indifferent. It keeps returning me to the same sponsor reads, the same cadence, the same gentle insistence that everything is normal. It’s like the broadcast exists outside the update cycle, outside the obsession with “latest,” outside the idea that time must progress cleanly.

That mismatch is weirdly comforting. It’s also unsettling in the exact way Northwoods specializes in: the reassurance that comes from repetition, paired with the suspicion that repetition is not merely soothing, but structural.

Another few weeks, at least.

The House of Sleep will return, spelled however it’s spelled. Beatrice will be fine, or “fine.” Bill will become Phil without explanation. A “next week” sale will echo out of a season that has already ended.

Then, a pitch will land on the corner, an out will be recorded, and the world will feel steady again—steady enough for the fracture to sink in deeper, until the lullaby starts to sound less like comfort and more like a chant the town has been repeating to keep itself intact.