Painting a picture
The recent anniversary of Ernie Harwell's birth got me thinking about the state of baseball broadcasting.
If you’re from Northwest Ohio as I am, there’s a pretty good chance you enjoyed a summer evening with the AM radio tuned to the 50,000 watt blowtorch out of downtown Detroit, WJR. You were listening to the dulcet tones of Ernie Harwell and his longtime radio partner, Paul Carey, and it didn’t really matter whether the Tigers were winning or (more likely in that era) losing, you were engaged in the broadcast. Ernie was one of those broadcasters who could make even a 10-1 laugher interesting as he reached into his deep repertoire of stories and sayings, whether it was “excessive window shopping” or “stood there like the house by the side of the road and watched it go by” for a strikeout looking or “two for the price of one” with a double play.
Ernie was one of a whole group of premier broadcasters during that era when you could find them up and down the dial on clear-channel radio stations that penetrated the humid summer night. They were the ones who made you want to sneak a transistor radio under the sheets and as quietly as possible listen to a late-inning rally on the West Coast.
While we were also familiar with the team of George Kell and Al Kaline doing the few dozen Tiger TV telecasts each season, there was just something different about having to use your imagination a little bit. Kids always wondered just how Ernie knew the fella that was taking home that foul ball was from Flint or Chesaning or Monroe or a hundred other Michigan towns from hamlet to big city. (I wonder if he did that when he was Baltimore’s broadcaster in the late 1950s? A young man from Salisbury will be taking that home…)
As the Harwell generation retired, though, the broadcast world changed. Many AM stations found it was more lucrative to switch to a talk radio format, relegating baseball broadcasts to local stations where coverage was more hit-and-miss. And the maturation of cable TV was a tradeoff: coverage of every game, for a price. Regional cable networks became the home of most teams, leaving over-the-air stations (meaning those in rural areas where baseball used to reign supreme) out in the cold.
And while minor league baseball was never a large-scale broadcast juggernaut, many of those teams have abandoned over-the-air broadcasts entirely. A few years back when I worked evenings in the summer, my regular companion was the Shorebirds game being played as I listened in on the local AM radio simulcast online, then I could keep listening in the car as I drove home. Now I don’t have that option anymore. And except for second-tier stations in the immediate area of a major league team, affiliates seldom bother with carrying anything but weekend games or special occasions like Opening Day.
Yet we may be going forward into the past soon. A number of teams will have to be carried by MLB in their local areas as one of the biggest broadcast producers filed for bankruptcy last year. The problem is that people are cutting the cord, making cable broadcasting untenable. And unless a local station has a spare channel to devote to covering the team (something like Delmarva Sports Network here) they’re not going to give up on their network programming for coverage that draws just a few hundred people.
And baseball isn’t America’s primary sport anymore, even though it should be. Last season football, whether NFL or college, was almost every one of the 100 highest-rated programs based on its Sunday night coverage on NBC, prime time games on other networks, or regular-season 4:25 games that bled over into prime time. The World Series wasn’t a factor.
Baseball used to be appointment listening for the games, stories, and broadcasters. Now it’s been distilled into a vehicle for betting, whether outright at one of the online gambling salons, or as part of a fantasy baseball league. (Admittedly, football works much better for that. Look for the United Football League spring fantasy leagues coming to a computer near you.) Broadcasters now can give you every number in the stat book about a guy, but probably wouldn’t be able to connect him to a human interest story like those guys back in the day could.
In an era when we had three channels and no air conditioning, sitting on the porch catching a game was a great way to pass the time, but now we sit in our climate-controlled fortresses and watch 153 channels of blech. It almost makes you want to search on the internet for old radio broadcasts. I’ll bet that after all we’ve been through that even a 10-1 pounding of the Texas Rangers sounds better now.
Until next time, also remember you can Buy Me a Coffee since I have a page there.