[blind-philly-comp] Fw: Scandals won't kill baseball. Kicking the games off the radio just might

From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "ecollege1" for DMARC)
To: <"Undisclosed-Recipient:;"@freelists.org>
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2020 10:48:31 -0500

Blank

From: Tom Kauffman
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2020 4:46 PM
To: Tom Kauffman
Subject: FW: Scandals won't kill baseball. Kicking the games off the radio just
might

I hope this doesn’t happen! While I don’t have a major proplem streaming games
on At Bat or the computer, I hope it never gets completely taken off of the
radio!

Tom

From: Marcia Moses <mgmoses@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2020 4:09 PM
To: 'Steve' <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: Scandals won’t kill baseball. Kicking the games off the radio just
might

This is absolutely nuts!

From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2020 11:03 AM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: Scandals won’t kill baseball. Kicking the games off the radio just
might

What an unbelievable move!

Steve

Scandals won’t kill baseball. Kicking the games off the radio just might.
The Oakland A’s are the first team to opt for streaming only, but the move is
more likely to lose fans than gain new ones.
article

Oakland Athletics pitcher Liam Hendriks celebrates after a strikeout to end the
game against the San Francisco Giants on Aug. 14 last year. (Jeff Chiu/AP)

By Micheline Maynard
Micheline Maynard is an author and journalist who was Detroit bureau chief for
the New York Times.
February 19 at 6:00 AM

When experts examine the decline of 21st-century Major League Baseball, it
won’t just be performance-enhancing drugs or sign-stealing scandals that pointed
the way. It will be teams’ decision to take baseball off the radio.

The news from Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday shocked people for whom baseball and
radio are the perfect partnership: The Oakland Athletics will not broadcast
games on local radio in 2020. They become the first MLB team to remove their
play-by-play from their home radio airwaves. For fans on the move, or not
in front of a television, the A’s games will be available only via streaming. A
laptop, desktop, smartphone or other device will be required to hear the
broadcasts.

“The primary motivation for this endeavor is around fan development, marketing,
and really understanding how that can
acquire new fans
,” said the A’s president, Dave Kaval, according to the Mercury News.

I’m not buying it. This move will lose fans. By taking radio out of the mix,
the A’s run the risk of alienating an audience that has been there for baseball
since Aug. 5, 1921, when KDKA broadcast a game between the Philadelphia
Phillies and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Gone in Oakland will be the ability to switch on a car radio and tune into the
game. Fans won’t be able to press a button on a radio at home, sit back
and let the broadcast fill their dens. It will be harder for fans who listen to
games on headphones in the ballpark, too — a not inconsiderable segment
of baseball fans. I’ve visited parks from Oakland to Chicago to D.C., and
almost every stadium has balky WiFi that gets harder to use the more people
there
are in the park. And streaming a game on your cellphone can quickly run down
the battery. There’s simply no substitute for a radio.

While you can pay to hear games in your car on satellite radio, Oakland is not
the rich city its San Francisco neighbor is. And it’s cumbersome to stream
in many older cars, which require connecting a phone to the car radio, either
through a cable or Bluetooth.

Also shut out are the people who work nights and weekends in jobs where they
can’t use a phone but can switch on a radio.

[Baseball is the only sport that justifies optimism on Opening Day]

The A’s, incredibly, are promoting the shift as a way to attract more
listeners. “I think this is the direction of the future,” Kaval said.
Streaming-only
broadcasts certainly fit the direction the MLB is taking. The MLB-TV streaming
service had an 18 percent jump last year in paid subscriptions, while MLB
At Bat, the sport’s phenomenally popular app, had 2 billion visits,
as it touted in a news release.

“I get it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if more teams make this move,”
Sports Illustrated staff writer Emma Baccellieri tweeted
of the A’s move. “But it still makes me sad.”

Tike Narry, a baseball fan who tweets from
@eddiesofficials,
went further: “Not a good decision to abandon terrestrial radio, @Athletics.
Not a good decision at all.”

If radio was just an afterthought these days, the move might be more
defensible. But radio remains a powerful listener force. A July 2018
survey by Nielsen Scarborough
found that baseball was the most listened-to professional sport on radio in the
United States. About 12 percent of all adults had listened to at least
one game on the radio in the previous 12 months. When baseball broadcasts come
on the air, the ratings for the radio stations that carry them can triple.

Critics complain that baseball games have gotten too slow, at an average of
more than three hours per broadcast. But advertisers say the airtime gives
them lots of exposure. Detroit attorney Mark Bernstein told me that the
Bernstein Law Firm gets calls from all over the country because fans hear
commercials
for it on Tigers’ broadcasts.

As an early adopter of the MLB app, I’ve used it extensively to stream radio
broadcasts, which I prefer to TV commentary, and frankly I’ve found that the
app gets obnoxious. There’s usually a delay in the play-by-play. If I stream
from the app at home, that means I have to sync the Tigers’ sterling radio
team of Dan Dickerson and Jim Price with the picture from Fox Sports Detroit on
TV. Sometimes I don’t bother to sync the picture; I let the radio play
in the background while I have a cup of tea or do some needlepoint. The simple
act connects me to my childhood. Growing up, I could hear Tigers broadcasts
out kitchen windows or from the front porches of multiple homes in our
neighborhood. It was possible to go for a walk down the street and not miss a
pitch.
When I traveled to California at age 11, I had a little transistor radio with
me and got to hear Vin Scully broadcasting the Los Angeles Dodgers. I’m sure
my parents thought I was crazy, standing in the middle of Disneyland with a
radio held to my ear, but I remember the warmth of that California night and
the sound of Scully’s velvety voice.

[The weird similarities between the beginning and end of D.C.’s baseball woes]

As Rich Lowry put it in an essay in National Review last summer, “baseball on
the radio remains
an iconic American sound
.” For July and August nighttime games, “the murmur of the crowd, just like the
sawing of cicadas, the chirping of crickets, the calling of frogs,” he
wrote, “speaks of the delicious languor of an American summer.”

The A’s say that games will still be broadcast over the air outside the Bay
Area, on stations ranging from Sacramento to Eureka and Fresno, and that there
are Spanish broadcasts on two outlets in the Bay Area. Streaming will also give
the team a respite from a rocky radio relationship that has featured the
A’s on 15 stations since they moved to Oakland from Kansas City in 1968,
according to the Mercury News.

But young fans and their grandparents and everyone in between in the A’s
hometown will not get to enjoy a simple pleasure experienced by millions of
Americans:
the comfort of baseball on the radio. If they get out of the habit, they might
find that baseball no longer plays a role in their lives. And that, not
scandal, is the biggest danger to the game of all.

Follow-Ups:
- [blind-philly-comp] Re: Fw: Scandals won't kill baseball. Kicking the games off the radio just might
  - From: Maria Campbell

[blind-philly-comp] Fw: Scandals won't kill baseball. Kicking the games off the radio just might

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