Harry Caray and Jack Buck, Jack and Mike Shannon, Mike and John Rooney. Buddy Blattner and Denny Matthews and Denny’s successors for 50 years—–
No matter where you grew up, the voices of the guys in the booth brought you word pictures of the great summer game.
There have been ghosts in boxes telling us about baseball and news of our town and the world since Harold Arlen sat in a box seat behind home plate at old Forbes Field in Pittsburgh on the afternoon of August 5, 1921 and described over KDKA how the Pirates came from behind to beat the Philadelphia Phillies 8-5, thanks to six strong innings by relief pitcher Jimmy Zinn.
But listen to former Miami Marlins executive David Samson who says on his podcast that nobody needs baseball on the radio anymore.
“The difference between TV and radio is disappearing before our very eyes. We don’t need baseball on radio anymore. The only reason we have baseball on radio is so people can feel better about what baseball means to them.”
And what is wrong with that? What’s wrong, he says, is radio. It’s no longer the medium it was. He’s terribly correct about that. But it‘s still a medium that is worth a lot of money in the buying and the selling of stations. Not according to Samson.
“Here’s the thing about radio today. It’s totally changed. There’s no money in radio. If you’re on AM radio right now, well, let’s just say that you ought to be simulcasting. You ought to be on YouTube. You ought to be a podcast because money in AM radio has pretty much disappeared.
“What teams do is they buy time on their radio stations. Sometimes they own their radio stations, not a good business. They buy a block of time, and then they go out and sell ads. They literally either outsource it to a company, or they have a sales force themselves trying to sell radio ads. Plus, they produce their own radio, and guess what? It’s not very profitable. It’s like a nightmare.”
Baseball on radio, he maintains, is for “old people”
And when us old people go toes up, radio baseball dies, too.
Barrett Media, which reports on radio news, sports, and the music industry, records Samson saying, “Baseball and radio goes together like peanut butter and jelly. It goes together like cookies and cream. You require to have baseball and radio because everybody hasn’t died yet who grew up listening to baseball on the radio. But guess what? That generation is going to die at some point. Then you will have people who are older, who they grew up on their device, listening through the internet, listening to the audio of the video.”
He forecasts that radio will “go the way of Kodak and Blockbuster” but “the voices will find a different way to get into your brain because you have a different way of engaging with content.”
Radio has re-invented itself many times in its long history. Yes, AM radio is in the process of committing suicide with its emphasis on profits over service to the community, incessant yacking that talks but doesn’t educate or report. He didn’t criticize the FM dial which is where we are more likely to find the Cardinals and the Tigers and the Chiefs and the Royals.
ESPN announcer Jorge Sedano counters that it’s always going to be important “to have a broadcast that’s friendly for those in vehicles.” He says those in the broadcast booth whose performances in the Theatre of the Mind are practicing “an art form in itself,” and he pointed to those who are not “interested in what’s best for the fan, just for the bottom line.”
That is exactly what is wrong with radio generally. It’s run by people who see stations as properties, communities as markets, and local voices as expendable.
Can radio survive as an over-the-air medium? Not as long as it gives people no reason to tune in, not as long as it makes no effort to be the voice of the community, not as long as I can roam the dial and hear the same people prattling on about the same thing, none of which is useful to living in my community, none of which tells me what’s happening in city hall, the county courthouse, the schoolboard, or what the high school football team did last night.
But people will always want to hear someone tell a story, whether it’s considered local news, or whether it’s somebody describing a sporting event with the skills of putting someone in their car or in their kitchen in the stadium or in the fieldhouse.
But what do I know? I’m one of Samson’s “old people” facing eventual mortality disability.
Prominent baseball philosopher Annie Savoy once said, in part—.
I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball… I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there’s no guilt in baseball, and it’s never boring.
Even more important is the comment from famous author Terrance Mann:
“The one constant through all the years…has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game — it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”
And radio has helped it be all of those things, a “constant” that is “never boring.” The John Rooneys and the Denny Mathewses will be doing their thing for this great game, somehow, long after David Sansom and I have left the field.
