Baseball on the Radio

                On this date 96 years ago (August 5, 1921), for the first time in history, a Major League Baseball Game was broadcast over the radio. Pittsburgh radio station KDKA broadcasted the action of a game between the hometown Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies from Forbes Field. Harold Arlin was the man calling the game and therefore became baseball’s first play-by-play broadcaster. The Pirates won the game 8-5.

                Listening to a baseball game on the radio has pretty much become a thing of the past. With the ability to watch every game on MLB.tv or on one of the ESPN or FOX channels, visual pictures of live games have rendered the radio broadcasts obsolete, or at least confined to those listening to the radio on their way home from work.

                For those of us who grew up in the 80s and early-90s, before the wall-to-wall television coverage, baseball on the radio was how we followed the game, especially if cable was not available in your house (it wasn’t in mine).

                As a Blue Jay fan growing up in a small town in southern Ontario, a two-hour drive from Toronto, we usually got to see the Jays play on TV on Sunday afternoons and most Wednesday evenings on the CTV network. And because the Jays were always competitive in those days, the occasional game on NBC’s Game of the Week on Saturday afternoons or ABC’s Monday Night Baseball were a treat.

                The rest of the time, we caught the games on the radio. The Jays’ radio broadcasters were Tom Cheek and Jerry Howarth. (Howarth still does the Jays games on the radio. Tom Cheek passed away in 2005 and was posthumously honoured with the Ford C Frick Award, for major contributions to baseball for a broadcaster, in 2013.) They were so good at calling and describing the action, you could almost see it happening. I would listen to games long after my parents thought I was in bed, with the volume up just enough so I could hear it, but not too loud so that it would wake up my younger brother who shared the same room as me.

Below: The Blue Jays radio broadcast team of Tom Cheek and Jerry Howarth in 1983.

                During the summer, my mother would always make us play outside. While I appreciate the fact (many years later) that she made us stay active, at the time, I just wanted to listen to the game. I would sneak into my dad’s workshop and listen to the game on his radio in there when the Jays played in the afternoon.

                As I got older and as the Jays fell from the top of the baseball world, the radio broadcasts got pushed away. So much baseball is on TV, and our brains are trained to be lazy. Listening to the broadcast is harder work than watching because you have to picture what is happening, rather than have the pictures being shown to you.    

                Unfortunately, listening to the Jays on the radio is now restricted to while I’m in the car. For the past few years, I’ve mentioned to some of my friends that it would be good to get back into the habit. Sitting on the porch on a summer evening, with a cold drink in my hand and nothing but the sound of crickets and the game on the radio would be a great way to reminisce about my childhood.

To be honest, I miss that.