Remembering Baseball on the Radio

Picture credits: Authentic History

Interest in professional baseball boomed after the Civil War. Saloons and billiard parlors posted results as they came in over Western Union wires.

By the early 1900s, the World Series would draw crowds to theaters or stand for hours in town squares across the country, watching mechanical reproductions of the action while a microphone man described it – an early form of tubeless, screenless television. 

Then along came the radio, store-bought or homemade static-crackling crystal sets, which enabled people to stay at home and listen to in-studio singers and musicians and lectures and stories – and sporting events. 

The Earliest Broadcasts

The marriage of baseball and radio was more of an elopement than an official contract. A station in Schenectady, north of New York City, hired a New York sportswriter to transmit the play-by-play action via Western Union to the station, where an announcer would report it as it happened. Other stations hired messengers who relayed the game action by telephone or to a confederate outside the ballpark.

In 1922 the all-New York World Series was broadcast to a limited area in the northeast.

Major league club owners didn’t know what to make of this new phenomenon. If they allowed their games to be broadcast, people would stay home and listen to them, rather than make the effort and pay the cost of going to the ballpark. How could you give away your product and stay in business? 

William Wrigley Jr.

William Wrigley Jr. knew how. The owner of the Chicago Cubs saw it as a form of free advertising, and advertising had built the Wrigley chewing gum empire. Listening to the action and descriptions of the Cubs’ players and their personalities would build a fan base, especially among women who could listen to the games while doing their housework.

It was like giving out samples of his chewing gum. Pique interest and they would come out to see them in action. To pique the interest of working men, he sponsored an hour-long summary of the day’s game in the evening.

William Wrigley Jr. sponsored early baseball radio broadcasts - and business boomed! Picture credits: Find a Grave

So Wrigley invited any and all Chicago radio stations to broadcast Cubs games – free. At one point the games were carried by five different stations. In 1927 the American League voted to leave the decision of game broadcasts to the individual clubs. The White Sox immediately followed the Cubs on the air. 

At first Wrigley wanted former players to do the play-by-play. But most of them proved to be clumsy and dull talking into the mike, and they were relegated to guest spots. Sportswriters and studio announcers replaced them. 

But there were two future Hall of Fame players who successfully made the transition from the playing field to the radio booth and set an example for all future play-by-play announcers.

Harry Heilmann

Harry Heilmann was a career .342-hitting outfield contemporary of Ty Cobb’s for the Detroit Tigers. In 1933 he began broadcasting Tigers’ games and remained for 17 years.

He was an exciting describer of the action on the field. During rain delays or other breaks in the action, he entertained listeners with descriptions of his days playing for Ty Cobb and the Tigers. 

Waite Hoyt

Waite Hoyt pitched in six World Series for the Yankees of the 1920s and had some vaudeville experience when he became the voice of the Cincinnati Reds in 1942.

Like Heilmann’s fans, Hoyt’s listeners prayed for rain so they could listen to his stories of Babe Ruth and other teammates and players of his time.

Road Games

During the early years of baseball on the air, play-by-play announcers were not allowed to travel with the teams and originate live broadcasts from other ballparks without the other team’s permission, which was never granted. So they had to make do with studio recreations. And that was an art in itself.

The announcer sat in a windowless studio in the station’s offices with a Western Union telegrapher seated in an adjoining cubicle with a telegraph key and an open line to the far-away ballpark, where another Western Union man sat.

Usually, the operator wedged an empty Prince Albert tobacco can into the receiver to amplify the ticker sound. A ball-or-strike call of each pitch and the batter’s action was typed on a slip of paper and handed to the announcer or a go-between.

The first radio broadcasts were popular with both men and women. Homemakers would listen to descriptions of their favourite players while working in the house. Picture credits: Unpretentious Bouquet of Parentheses

This kind of reporting was an art in itself, requiring more imagination than describing what you see. A note that said, “foul ball” might be embellished to describe a fan in the stands who caught it. An unseen double play or dropped fly ball had to be made exciting. Sometimes the announcer rapped the edge of the table with a ruler to simulate the sound of the bat hitting the ball.

A recording of crowd noises and vendors’ cries played in the background.

The broadcast usually started an inning after the start of the game to give the announcer a cushion in case of a break in the transmission, which sometimes happened. At the same time, it required some acting ability to infuse appropriate excitement into describing a game-winning home run when you knew it was coming fifteen minutes ahead of time.

Commissioner Landis

In the early 1930s, announcers felt free to criticize umpires on the air when they disagreed with umps’ calls, sometimes inspiring showers of bottles or other missiles from the fans in the seats listening on portable radios.

At the 1936 All-Star Game, Commissioner Kennesaw Landis appeared before a meeting of broadcasters and outlined his guidelines and rules for them:

If you see men putting up a gallows in center field and then see men lead me out to it and hang me on it, go on and describe it into the microphone. But don’t you question the justice of the hanging, understand?

When you broadcast baseball, let your hearers have it just as it is, but don’t umpire the game. Don’t decide controversies. It’s different with the baseball writers. They’re privileged to have their opinions. They can criticize an umpire.

Don’t give a reproachful name to an umpire over the air. And don’t say anything that would indicate you favor either team. [Landis was unable to diminish the “homers” in the business].

Your medium is different from the newspaper writers’. I’m not saying which is best, not making any comparisons. It’s just a different medium, that’s all.

In other words: Describe what you see; describe everything you see; describe only what you see.

New York

While all this was going on, baseball fans in the New York area were being shut out. The three teams – the Giants, Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers – had made a pact: they would not broadcast their games.

This was partly because, as the only city with three teams, the two National League teams were often playing at home at the same time. Several radio stations in the area broadcast recreations of game highlights in the evening.

The agreement ended in 1939, when the Dodgers’ Larry MacPhail hired Red Barber away from Cincinnati, launching a new era that led to the arrival of the likes of Vin Scully, Mel Allen and Ernie Harwell. But that’s another story for another blog. As the radio announcers used to say: “Stay tuned.”