$Unique_ID{BAS00181}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Baseball on the Air}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{
Adomites, Paul D.}
$Subject{broadcast broadcasting Radio air airings TV television telecast
telecasts}
$Log{}

Total Baseball:  The Game Off the Field


Baseball on the Air

Paul Adomites


     The story of broadcast baseball actually begins almost seventy years
before the first game was aired. Baseball owners have always been of two minds
about any fan interest that wasn't satisfied at the game itself. The common
sentiment was "They'll stay home instead of coming to the game." Yet these
outside sources generated extra income, and owners are businessmen first of
all. As early as the 1860s, it was already clear that baseball sold
newspapers, and newspapers sold baseball. Yet some owners feared "giving the
game away."
     The owners' schizophrenic response also occurred with telegraphy. Even
though telegraph operators paid for the privilege of relaying game reports to
saloons and poolrooms, a "hot debate" over whether this "free" sport was
keeping people away from the parks led some owners to try to ban telegraph
machines from their operations.
     In 1897, each team received $300 worth of free telegrams on a league-wide
contract, and some owners complained that it was hurting attendance. Sixteen
years later, Western Union offered each team $17,000 a year for five years for
the telegraph rights. It was hard for the owners to say no.
     Even the fledgling motion picture industry got into the act, paying
baseball $500 in 1910 for the rights to film and show the World Series.
American League President Ban Johnson, who saw movies as competition,
suggested that baseball ask for ten times as much for rights to film the 1911
Series, figuring that it would frighten the moviemen away. It didn't.
However, baseball had to settle for only seven times what it had received the
year before.
     The point is obvious--baseball was far from being overexposed. Even
though he was talking about telegraphy, John R. Tunis in 1923 pointed out the
real value of broadcasting baseball. He described the World Series thrilling
people in New Orleans, San Francisco, Honolulu, and even "an excited group of
Mongolians in Seoul, the capital of Korea." The point is, advanced
communications create fans everywhere, even thousands of miles from the parks.

Radio Days

The first major league game was broadcast over radio on August 5, 1921, from
Pittsburgh, home of the Westinghouse Corporation, over the new Westinghouse
station, KDKA. Harold Arlin, a Westinghouse foreman, announced the Pirates-
Phillies contest from Forbes Field. Westinghouse was eager to make a name for
itself in the new industry. The next day, Arlin broadcast the U.S. Open
tennis tournament, also near Pittsburgh. Two months later he did the first
football broadcast.
     That same year the first World Series broadcast was aired to a handful of
fans on the East Coast. By 1922, the Series was heard "live by 5,000,000
people." Re-creations were heard by fans on three continents.
     (Many of the early baseball broadcasts, and almost all away-game airings
were re-created in a hometown radio studio, with announcers reading
pitch-by-pitch information from ticker tapes, and using sound effects and
canned crowd noises to simulate live action. In 1950, the Red Sox provided
the first live coverage of all their away games. Within five years,
major-league re-creations were antiques, as the teams were broadcasting all
their games live. At the minor-league level, re-creation continued for away
games into the 1960s.)
     The first owner to see radio's promise to boost fan interest was the
Cubs' boss Philip Wrigley. In 1925 he invited all the Chicago radio stations
to carry all the Cubs' games. No charge. Sam Breadon, the Cardinals' owner,
followed suit soon thereafter, in the first two attempts to develop regional
followings.
     In 1926 and 1927 the first great national radio networks began operation:
NBC and CBS. This was the beginning of radio's golden era. Sales of radio
equipment, a $60 million industry in 1922, were nearly a billion dollars in
1929.
     Yet many owners were still wary. By the 1930s, the two-team cities of
Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago had an agreement not to broadcast
away games. In other words, if the Braves were at home, you could hear their
game on the radio, but not the Red Sox. The owners' wail ("they won't come to
the park if you give the game away") seemed turned on its logical head under
this arrangement, but home radio is where you ballyhoo home-game attendance,
which was the concern, anyway.
     The New York owners went one step further. In 1932 they agreed to ban
all radio, even visitors' re-creations, from their parks.
     Larry MacPhail took over the Reds in 1933 and sold a controlling interest
in the club to Powel Crosley, owner of two Cincinnati radio stations. It was a
match made in economic heaven: MacPhail knew that broadcasting games would
promote the team (he hired southerner Red Barber as his announcer), Crosley
now could boost his radio ratings. The mutuality was akin to Chris von der
Ahe, the St. Louis beer garden magnate, taking over the St. Louis club in the
American Association in order to sell more beer.
     Then, when MacPhail moved to Brooklyn in 1938, he brought Red Barber with
him, and broke the New York ban. The next year was the first year that all
the teams in the major leagues broadcast their games. Prophetically, it was
also the year of the first televised baseball game.
     In 1935, Judge Landis moved in to orchestrate the radio deal to cover the
World Series. All three networks were involved, and baseball made
$400,000. Landis, as ever, was imperious; he dismissed Ted Husing as
announcer of the games, even though with five World Series under his belt, Ted
was second only to the ubiquitous Graham MacNamee in Series-announcing
experience.
     The money for baseball broadcasting was growing. Gillette, the razor
blade manufacturer, one of the first companies to realize the power of sports
as an advertising vehicle, tried to flex their muscles by offering Red Barber
a substantial amount to walk out on his Dodger contract to join Gillette on a
new Yankees/Giants network. Barber refused. It's no wonder Gillette felt
powerful; in 1946 they were rich enough to sign a ten-year deal for exclusive
radio sponsorship of the World Series and All-Star Games, for $14 million.
     But the World Series was the exception; otherwise, baseball remained
locally dominated. However, in 1950, Gordon McLendon changed all that, when
he founded a new radio network, one with daily baseball as its centerpiece:
the Liberty Broadcasting System. His announcers re-created a game every day,
plus extras on weekends. McLendon charged the stations $10 per game, and
enrolled 300 of them. He paid his announcers $27.50 a week, netting himself a
weekly profit of over $2,970.
     But once again the moguls of baseball feared too much free publicity. A
rule banned the Game of the Day from many areas because there were fears that
it might conflict with local broadcasts within a 75-mile area.
     The paradoxical result, according to Curt Smith, was "If you lived in
Butte, Montana, or Amarillo, Texas, you got to hear every club in baseball,"
as many as ten games a week. But if you lived in a major league town (or near
one), you could hear only the locals, and only when the club decided the
broadcasts wouldn't "interfere" with attendance. McLendon's gold mine didn't
last long: he lost a suit against baseball and folded. Yet the Mutual
Broadcasting Network mimicked his strategy and succeeded.
     In 1951 Liberty broadcast more than 200 games, almost 600 hours of
baseball; Mutual did 145 games. That amount of time was more than quadruple
the amount of total network time (via television and radio) that baseball
would receive in 1984. More importantly, the Liberty/Mutual style set a
pattern for successful TV coverage years later.

TV or Not TV

Baseball on television began to take hold in the late 1950s. The Yankees were
the first team to sell their TV rights (in 1946, for $75,000; in 1987 the
Yankees earned 250 times as much for their TV rights). The first televised
World Series was the memorable 1947 set. Harry Coyle, the NBC dean of
baseball producers, was there. In Chicago, Jack Brickhouse was announcing
White Sox telecasts in 1948.
     By 1950 the World Series was televised as far west as Omaha; 38 million
watched. The next year World Series baseball television reached the West
Coast. (Radio still had strengths: the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers Radio Network
linked 117 stations, making the Bums the first "America's Team".)
     The era of baseball broadcasting that began in 1953 should have opened
the owners' eyes to the future, but it didn't. That year the first televised
Game of the Week began (then on ABC). Naturally, it was banned from all major
league cities. (Does this sound familiar?) Yet with the irrepressible Dizzy
Dean at the microphone, it rolled up incredible ratings anyway: 11.4 percent
of all households with sets, 51 percent of all sets in use. That translated
to 75 percent of all sets in use not in big league cities.
     And there was no doubt that the colorful Diz, with his demented grammar,
malapropisms, and ambling yarn-weaving, was the program. In 1955, a slick
advertising agency move landed the Game of the Week for CBS, and Curt Smith
says, "the most transforming baseball series in television's show of shows . .
. was born." Two years later a group of Sunday games was added to the
schedule. Baseball was on its way to becoming the truly national game; the
owners just felt they could do it without the help of the fans in the cities
where the teams played.
     Television was becoming a national mania. By 1955 only three teams
didn't televise (the Braves, Pirates, and A's). On the other hand, the Cubs,
Dodgers, Yankees, and Giants broadcast every home game, the Indians and Cards
every road game. The Reds televised all weekday afternoon home games; the
Phillies showed 29 home and 27 road games; Baltimore showed 65 contests; even
the Red Sox and Senators had TV on their schedule; six stations in Michigan
showed 42 Tigers games; WGN televised every day game from Comiskey Park.
     Then came football. The upstart NFL (and their very wise leader Pete
Rozelle) realized that TV was the way to build fan interest. Baseball's less
progressive owners still feared "giving it away," preferring local/regional
efforts. As Harold Rosenthal explains, "Football fans were sold as National
Football League fans--network television made them that way . . . In Appleton,
Wisconsin, a guy would turn on the tube and watch the Giants play the
Browns . . . Baseball fans were brought up to follow the Cardinals or Giants
or Tigers . . . the local coverage mattered, the local announcer."
     When the NFL signed an immense contract with TV in the early 1960s,
guaranteeing coverage, with all the NFL teams sharing the wealth, baseball
wanted to copy the plan. They asked for millions, but they didn't get it.
     What baseball got was the ABC Game of the Week: 28 telecasts a season;
each of the clubs receiving $300,000. Curt Smith explains the upshot: "By
1966, instead of watching as many as 123 games on three networks, a majority
of American viewers could behold only 28 telecasts on one network." The
"common good" policy was a mistake, but baseball couldn't figure this out.
They changed networks, to NBC, and we got a new announcer.
     "Curt Gowdy emerged for an entire generation of listeners as the national
signature of baseball broadcasting. From 1966 through 1975, he called
play-by-play for every All-Star Game, every World Series game, and virtually
every regular season network game" (Curt Smith). And that list doesn't even
include Gowdy's work on seven Super Bowls, seven Olympic Games, twelve NCAA
basketball championships, 13 Rose Bowls, the Pan Am Games, and twenty years of
"The American Sportsman."
     But Curt couldn't bring in the ratings; his highest regular season rating
was still two full points below Dizzy Dean's first year (and remember, Dizzy
wasn't allowed into any major league markets), and it dropped 15 percent by
1970; Curt's World Series ratings fell by nearly 20 percent, though it was
certainly no fault of his own. Solid, professional, and competent, he was
just never exciting. People never talked about him as they did about Dizzy or
other announcers. And he was definitely overexposed.
     Meanwhile football was coming on strong. In 1969 pro football televised
three times as many games on network TV as baseball. (Three times!) By 1969
not even all the baseball postseason games were broadcast nationally. The NFL
wasn't just growing; they were promoting. Their highlight films featured
thrilling action, rich drama, and the golden voice of orator John Facenda.
     Baseball, it was clear to everyone in the national press, was losing the
battle. "Baseball is dead" was a cliche. A Lou Harris poll showed that
football was now Americans' favorite sport. More importantly, another Harris
poll showed how baseball's popularity paralleled the degree of its TV
coverage. Where the big leagues were most heavily covered, baseball was most
popular. Where fans received only network coverage, baseball ranked lowest.
     But Commissioner Bowie Kuhn had something to say about the matter; he
pushed for World Series night games (the first was in 1971) because they could
attract a much larger audience. And while you could cynically dismiss this
move as pure economics (bigger viewership means more advertising dollars), it
worked.
     In 1975 baseball announced a new kind of TV deal: Alternating coverage
of the World Series, playoffs and All-Star Games between NBC and ABC. The
networks saw the advantages: postseason baseball play was the perfect time to
begin promoting the new fall TV season. The alternating feature built in an
element of competition without economic overtones: quality of coverage.
     Then came October 21, 1975. The Boston Red Sox, unable to win a World
Series since 1918, were on their way to a loss in six games to Cincinnati's
"Big Red Machine." But a three-run pinch-hit homer by Bernie Carbo tied the
game in the eighth, and in the twelfth (by now it was 12:34 A.M.), Carlton
Fisk hit a solo shot over the Green Monster to win the game. A total of 62
million people saw it, and television couldn't have planned it better, because
as Fisk hit his homer, the camera in the left field scoreboard followed him,
not the ball, and on replay the audience saw Fisk furiously trying to wave the
ball fair: the first-ever home run reaction shot.
     The next night, 75,890,000 people watched the seventh game, and baseball
was definitely back. In 1976, baseball received revenue from radio and
television near $51 million. Lou Harris said in 1977: "For the first time
since 1968, more sports fans in the country follow baseball than football."
Ten years later baseball received $350 million.
     And 1977 is also the year that cable television broadcasts began to have
their impact. The situation was analogous to the Liberty/Mutual networks'
Game of the Day, or the Dizzy Dean/CBS Game of the Week. Now fans all over
the country could see a lot of baseball, every day. By 1982, cable TV was in
35 percent of all American homes; in 1987 it passed the 50 percent mark.
     Superstations like Ted Turner's Atlanta TBS, Chicago's WGN, and New
York's WWOR and WPIX, along with the all-sports network, ESPN, were giving
fans more baseball on a regular basis than they had ever had before. In 1986
Cubs' games were viewed by 20 million fans. For his definitive history,
Voices of the Game, Curt Smith interviewed Cub fans in Kodiak, Alaska; Costa
Rica; and Boise, Idaho--all because of Harry Caray's calls on the Chicago
superstation. A Peter Ueberroth-inspired change in the rules to make
superstations give the other teams a certain amount of money per viewer passed
over Ted Turner's noisy objections. Sports-only premium cable networks have
failed in several places, largely due to the availability of the "free" (part
of the basic cable charge) coverage.
     Even though the superstation teams do not benefit directly, in cash
income, from sending their games around the country, (their parent
corporations do, of course . . . ), they do help to promote interest in
baseball as a whole. (For example, every Atlanta Braves game can be seen in
48 percent of U.S. households, yet in 1987 the Braves' broadcast rights earned
them the same as the Pittsburgh Pirates, whose five-station network reached as
far as Johnstown.)  As Harry Caray says, "We've made the Cubs part of their
lives; they have to be interested."
     By the late '80s, the advertising industry was announcing that the era of
megabuck sports TV packages was over; advertisers just didn't have enough
money to pay for them. What the ad pundits didn't realize was the value that
network TV saw in televising the League Championship series and World
Series--prime vehicles for introducing their new fall lineup. When time came
to renegotiate a national TV package, NBC (which had carried the Saturday Game
of the Week for years) and ABC (which had carried some Monday night games and
alternated LCS and Series with NBC) were both outslugged at the bargaining
table by third-rated CBS.
     CBS' deal for a handful of Saturday games plus all postseason play was
for $1.1 billion over four years. ESPN kicked in another $400 million for the
same period of time, and each team became instantly richer to the tune of
$14 million a year, plus change. The result was felt instantly on the field.
Free-agency outrageousness reached new heights, as the $3 Million Man was
created, then surpassed. When the owners tried to claim poverty at the 1990
labor negotiations, the players scoffed. And the average player increased his
annual wealth by $70,000 overnight.
     But before long CBS and ESPN were doubting the wisdom of their profligate
ways. Viewership had not risen enough to pay the bigger tab, and both claimed
huge losses. Even though CBS admitted the postseason had helped their new
lineup, they asked for (and were refused) rebates from baseball. The 1992 and
1993 World Series were two of the three lowest-TV rated Series ever (of
course having a Canadian team in it each year hurt things: Canadian viewership
is not counted in ratings). All the same, the fact is: more people watched the
sitcom "Home Improvement" than watched Game 3 of the Series. During the 1992
Series ESPN announced it was willing to pay a $13 million penalty in order to
forego its option to carry 1994-1995 games for $250 million. Owners, afraid
that their glory days of network TV billions were gone (and seeing another
chance to poor-mouth), decided to reopen negotiations on the Basic Agreement a
year early. Has the owners' century-old fear of "giving the game away" finally
come true? Has the baseball fan finally seen all he or she can stand? No, and
no.
     However, the falling ratings caused a major shakeup in the way baseball
will do its TV business from now on. In May of 1993 the owners signed a
dramatically different TV deal. Instead of having the networks pay baseball
for the rights to telecast games, the sport and the networks will become
partners, sharing equally in the TV revenue generated. So if people don't
watch baseball on TV, the sport itself will feel the pinch immediately. In
addition, the new deal offers the fewest free TV games ever, with no "Game of
the Week" until almost All-Star time. And with the expanded postseason, no fan
will be able to watch all the league championships. Instead, the games will
"regionalized." The big dollar era of TV money for baseball is over. What
happens next will redefine the sport's finances forever.