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05-10-2004, 01:30 AM

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BASEBALL ON THE AIR
Paul Adomites

The story of broadcast baseball begins almost 70 years before the first game was aired. Baseball club owners have always been of two minds about any fan interests that aren't satisfied at the game itself. The common sentiment has been, "They'll stay home instead of coming to the game." But in fact these outside sources also generate extra income, and owners are, after all, businesspeople. As early as the 1860s it was already clear that baseball sold newspapers and that newspapers sold baseball. Yet some owners still feared "giving the game away."

The owners responded similarly to the advent of telegraphy. Although telegraph operators paid for the privilege of relaying game reports to saloons and poolrooms, a heated 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 as part of 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 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 10 times as much for rights to film the 1911 Series, figuring that it would scare the moviemakers away. It didn't; but Organized Baseball did settle for 7 times the amount 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 imagined the World Series thrilling people in New Orleans, San Francisco, Honolulu, and even "an excited group of Mongolians in Seoul, the capital of Korea." He argued that advanced communications create fans everywhere, even thousands of miles from the parks.

RADIO DAYS

The first major league game to be broadcast via radio was on August 5, 1921, in Pittsburgh, home of the Westinghouse Corporation, by 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, so the next day Arlin broadcast the U.S. Open tennis tournament, also near Pittsburgh. Two months later he made 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 being heard live by an estimated 5 million 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 accounts 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 outmoded, 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 potential to boost fan interest was Cubs boss William Wrigley. In 1925 he invited all the Chicago radio stations to carry all the Cubs games free of charge. Cardinals owner Sam Breadon soon followed suit in a second attempt to develop a regional following. Between 1926 and 1927 the first great national radio networks, NBC and CBS, began operation. This was the beginning of radio's golden era. Sales of radio equipment, a $60 million industry in 1922, grew to nearly a billion dollars in 1929.

Many owners were still wary. By the 1930s the two-team cities of Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago had reached an agreement not to broadcast away games. In other words, if the Braves were at home, listeners could hear that game on the radio, but could not listen to the Red Sox away game. The owners' argument-"they won't come to the park if you give the game away"-was invalidated under this arrangement. The New York owners went one step further: in 1932 they agreed to ban all radio broadcasting-even of visitors' re-creations-from their parks.

THE REDS, THE RADIO, AND RED BARBER

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 and Crosley could now boost his radio ratings. Their symbiosis is reminiscent of St. Louis beer-garden magnate Chris Von der Ahe's takeover of the St. Louis team in order to sell more beer.

When MacPhail moved to Brooklyn in 1938 he brought Reds announcer Red Barber with him and broke the New York radio ban. The next year was the first year that all the major league teams broadcast their games. Prophetically, it was also the year of the first televised baseball game.

In 1935 Baseball Commissioner Judge Landis orchestrated a radio deal that covered the World Series. All three networks were involved, and baseball made $400,000. Landis, as ever, was imperious; he dismissed Ted Husing as games announcer despite the fact that, with five World Series under his belt, Husing was second only to the ubiquitous Graham McNamee in Series-announcing experience.

The amount of money involved in baseball broadcasting was growing. Gillette, the razor blade manufacturer and one of the first companies to realize the power of sports as an advertising vehicle, tried to flex its muscles by offering Red Barber a substantial amount to walk out on his Dodger contract and join Gillette on a new Yankees/ Giants network. Barber refused. It's no wonder Gillette felt powerful; in 1946 the company was rich enough to sign a 10-year, $14-million deal for exclusive radio sponsorship of the World Series and All-Star Games.

The World Series was the exception; otherwise, baseball remained dominated by local interests. In 1950, however, Gordon McLendon changed all that when he founded a new radio network, the Liberty Broadcasting System, with daily baseball coverage as its centerpiece. His announcers re-created a game every day, plus extra games on weekends. McLendon charged the stations $10 per game, and enrolled 300 stations. After paying his announcers $27.50 a week, he netted a handsome weekly profit of more than $2,970.

But the moguls of baseball still feared too much free publicity. A rule banned the Game of the Day from many areas because of fears that it might conflict with local broadcasts within a 75-mile area. The paradoxical result, according to Curt Smith, was that "if you lived in Butte, Montana, or Amarillo, Texas, you got to hear every club in baseball"-as many as 10 games a week. But if you lived in or near a major league town, you could hear only the local games, 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 Organized Baseball and folded. The Mutual Broadcasting Network mimicked his strategy and succeeded.

In 1951 Liberty broadcast more than 200 games, or almost 600 hours of baseball; Mutual aired 145 games. This was more than four times 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 in the years to come.

TELEVISED BASEBALL

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 event. Harry Coyle, NBC's 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 people watched. The next year World Series television coverage reached the West Coast. (Radio still had its 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 given the owners a foretaste of what was to come, but it didn't. That year the first Game of the Week telecasts began on ABC. Naturally, broadcasts were banned from all major league cities. With the irrepressible Dizzy Dean at the microphone it rolled up incredible ratings anyway: 11.4 percent of all households with sets and 51 percent of all sets in use. That translated to 75 percent of all sets in use outside of big league cities.

There was no doubt that the colorful Dean, with his demented grammar, malapropisms, and rambling yarn-spinning, was the program. In 1955, a slick advertising agency move landed the Game of the Week for CBS; as 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. Thanks to broadcasting, baseball was on its way to becoming a truly national game, although ironically the broadcast blackout persisted in big league cities.

Television was becoming a national mania. By 1955 only three teams didn't televise their games (the Braves, Pirates, and A's). On the other hand, the Cubs, Dodgers, Yankees, and Giants broadcast every home game, while the Indians and Cards aired every road game. The Reds televised all weekday afternoon home games, the Phillies showed 29 home and 27 road games, Baltimore showed 65 contests, six stations in Michigan showed 42 Tigers games, WGN televised every day game from Comiskey Park, and even the Red Sox and Senators embraced TV.

THE UPSTART NFL

Then came football. The upstart NFL (and its 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 and 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 a lucrative contract with TV in the early 1960s, guaranteeing coverage, and with all the NFL teams sharing the wealth, Major League Baseball wanted to follow suit. Baseball executives asked for millions, but they didn't get it.

What they got was the ABC Game of the Week featuring 28 telecasts a season, with each club receiving $300,000. As Curt Smith explained, "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 hadn't figured this out. They changed networks, moving to NBC, and the fans got a new announcer.

"Curt Gowdy emerged for an entire generation of listeners as the national signature of baseball broadcasting," asserts Curt Smith. "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." That list doesn't include Gowdy's work on 7 Super Bowls, 7 Olympic Games, 12 NCAA basketball championships, 13 Rose Bowls, the Pan Am Games, and 20 years of The American Sportsman.

But Gowdy couldn't bring in the ratings. His highest regular season rating was still two full points below Dizzy Dean 's first year (even with Dean's ban from major league markets), and it dropped 15 percent by 1970; Gowdy's World Series ratings fell by nearly 20 percent, although 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 Dean 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. By 1969 not even all the baseball postseason games were broadcast nationally. The NFL was not only growing; it was promoting. NFL highlight films featured thrilling action, rich drama, and the golden voice of orator John Facenda.

LOSING THE BATTLE

Baseball, it was clear to everyone in the national press, was losing the battle. A Lou Harris poll showed that football had become America's favorite sport. More importantly, another Harris poll showed that 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.

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn pushed for World Series night games because they could attract a much larger audience. While one could cynically dismiss this move as pure economics (bigger viewership means more advertising dollars), the first Fall Classic held at night in 1971 proved that it worked.

In 1975 baseball announced a new kind of TV deal. Coverage of the World Series, playoffs, and All-Star Games would alternate between NBC and ABC. The networks saw the advantages: postseason baseball play was the perfect time to begin promoting the new fall TV season. Dual network coverage also brought 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 then it was 12:34 a.m.) Carlton Fisk hit a solo shot over the "Green Monster" to win the game. Sixty-two 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. It was 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 approaching $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.

The year 1977 was also the year that cable television broadcasts began to have an impact. The situation was analogous to the Liberty and Mutual networks' Game of the Day, or the Dizzy Dean and CBS Game of the Week. Now fans across the country could see baseball every day. By 1982 cable TV was in 35 percent of all American homes; in 1987 it passed the 50 percent mark.

THE SUPERSTATIONS

Superstations such as Ted Turner's Atlanta TBS, Chicago's WGN, and New York's WWOR and WPIX, along with all-sports network ESPN, were giving fans more baseball on a regular basis than the game had ever seen. In 1986 Cubs games were viewed by 20 million fans. In his definitive history, Voices of the Game, Curt Smith interviewed Cub fans in Kodiak, Alaska; Costa Rica; and Boise, Idaho-all made possible by Harry Caray's calls on the Chicago superstation. A change in the rules (inspired by former Commissioner Peter Ueberroth) obliging superstations to give opposing teams a certain amount of money per viewer was 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 terms of cash income, from sending their games around the country, their broadcasts 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 amount as the Pittsburgh Pirates, whose five-station network reached only as far as Johnstown, Pennsylvania. As Harry Caray said, "We've made the Cubs part of their lives; they have to be interested."

By the late 1980s the advertising industry was announcing that the era of megabuck sports TV packages was over because advertisers no longer had enough money to pay for them. What the ad pundits didn't realize was that network TV saw value in televising the League Championship Series anl the World Series-prime vehicles for introducing their new fall programming lineups. 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 had alternated the League Championship Series and World 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. When ESPN kicked in another $400 million for the same period of time, each team became instantly richer to the tune of $14 million a year. The result was felt immediately on the field. Free agency 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. The average player increased his annual wealth by $70,000 overnight.

END OF THE GLORY DAYS?

Before long CBS and ESPN were doubting the wisdom of their profligate ways. Viewership had not risen enough to pay the higher tab, and both networks claimed huge losses. Even though CBS admitted the postseason had helped its new lineup, it asked for (and was refused) rebates from baseball. The 1992 and 1993 World Series received two of the three all-time lowest TV ratings for a Series. This was due in part to Canadian viewership not being counted in the ratings. During the 1992 Series ESPN announced it was willing to pay a $13 million penalty to forego its option to carry 1994-95 games for $250 million.

Owners, afraid that their glory days of network TV billions were gone, decided to reopen negotiations on the Basic Agreement a year early. Had the owners' century-old fear of "giving the game away" finally come true? Had baseball fans finally seen enough? No, and no.

However, the ratings decline caused a major shake-up in the way baseball will be televised from now on. In May of 1993 the owners signed a dramatically different TV deal. Instead of having the networks pay Organized Baseball for the rights to telecast games, the sport and the networks ABC and NBC became partners, forming The Baseball Network (TBN), sharing equally the TV revenues or losses. The new deal offered the fewest free TV games ever; TBN didn't begin its broadcasts until after the All-Star Game and offered only a dozen prime-time, regular-season games thereafter. (In 1994 that number was further reduced by the strike.)

The postseason Division Series was to have been regionalized, so that no fan would have been able to see all of the games live. As a rookie, TBN showed some promise. The 15.7 rating for the All-Star Game was the highest in recent years, and, reportedly, ad sales for the later games exceeded expectations. But in terms of spreading the baseball gospel through TV, some contended that, with TBN, the sport had taken a giant step backwards.