It’s baseball season – whoopee! For those of you who are relatively new users and/or testing – primer on baseball and radio streaming.
First, it is helpful to turn on “show sports teams” (Preferences), which is OFF by default.
Stations are not allowed to steam MLB games, even if the station is owned by a baseball team. This means that whenever a game is on, the stream has something else on it. Some stations stream their normal syndicated programs, in which case you would not know the “real” station has baseball.
Other stations put on an Internet only feed of something prerecorded – Clark Howard seems to be popular for this purpose. Some stations just stream silence or bring down the stream.
So from now to October, on a station known to carry baseball – start from the assumption that any down server / silent / wrong program is a baseball game. Click on the brown baseball (or report sports) – choose the team listed and it should show the team schedule. If it is from an hour before game time to 4 hours after, it’s safe to assume that’s the issue and go ahead and report it as baseball game, even though you didn’t actually hear the game. The team web site also typically has real time scoring, so you can look at the innings to see if the game is still going on.
Keep in mind an East Coast team might be in California and the game might last until 2-3 AM (ET) if it goes into extra innings or has a rain delay.
Many minor league baseball stations do permit streaming, in which case it will be obvious. One key to figuring out what kind of baseball game you are hearing is if the bat sounds metallic instead of wood, that’s typically high school or college baseball. Minor league baseball uses wood bats.
After the game is over, stations might then play shows on delay that were preempted (like Savage), totally messing up the rest of the day’s schedule. They also may put in a taped show during the hour they plan to break away for the game, rather than interrupting a live syndicated show (and deal with irate phone calls)
Baseball games should not cause you to “suppress” the listing. The show may in fact come on the air when the baseball game is over. Reporting it as a sporting event leaves it in the schedule, but flagged with a comment that a sporting event is currently in progress.
We love sports! (right?)
