At the age of 10 in 1965, I got my first job – selling copies of the Pittsburgh Press – I got to keep 1.5 cents for each copy I sold. Many people were interested in reading about the baseball races.
In the early 1960s, Radio and Baseball had a marriage made in heaven. transistor radios had arrived. People could go to Forbes Field and listen to Bob Prince announce “you can kiss that baby goodbye!” as Roberto Clemente lobbed another home run over the wall in the short right field fence. Half the city had KDKA-AM tuned on their radio.
Major League Baseball considered TV to be a danger to its franchises – making the same mistake it made with radio 35 years earlier. Only a few games were on TV. The cost of transmitting TV signals from a remote city was significant – so most TV coverage was from the networks, and if the network was covering a home game, the game was blacked out. The thinking was that if people could watch the game from home, they wouldn’t come to the game and attend Iron City Beer Night.
Baseball had two leagues. The team that won the most games went to the World Series. In the event two teams won the same number of games, one extra game was played to decide the League Champion.
The World Series started around October 1st – a best of 7 series 2-3-2 with a travel day in between. Baseball was done by October 10th at the latest, way before any chance for snow.
Then TV showed up with a big checkbook. Umpires needed to be aware of TV commercial breaks, satellite and other costs made it cheaper to show games in another city. The central field camera became a way to see the catcher’s signals.
Splitting the leagues into divisions meant more teams in more cities. The division championship series meant more games and more postseason revenue. People tend to lose interest once their team is “out” for the year.
If 2 divisions was good, 3 is even better. Now we can have division series with 8 teams, division championships with 4 teams and the World Series with the final two – with the final game on October 27th.
SO, the point of this trip down memory lane is to remind you that the regular season is wrapping up. Baseball games will be on almost every day in October. ESPN Radio owns the post season broadcast rights, so you won’t find a lot of post season preemptions in radio. The teams that haven’t been eliminated will still have local coverage (that they can’t stream)
MLB is making the same mistake the third time – they view streaming of their games by radio stations as a competitive danger to their paid streaming service.
Ah nostalgia – I lived in Pittsburgh, but well after the days of Clemente (he is a statue in front of the stadium now). I grew up watching Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris knock them over the wall in Yankee Stadium.
As you so eloquently state: baseball is making a big mistake by not streaming. The instant audience at the end of every iPhone and iPad is a lot larger and well-heeled than they think. If they don’t lead the way, someone else certainly will.
A friend patiently humored me on a visit to Pittsburgh last summer when I insisted on finding what was left of the Forbes Field wall. At the age of 8, my first memory of pro baseball was seeing game 7 of the 1960 World Series on a grainy black and white TV. I would become neither a Pirates nor a Yankees supporter (the arrival of the Mets in 1962 was great timing) but have been a baseball fan ever since.
When the streaming era hit, I took joy in finding the odd 250-watt affiliate in Podunk which forgot to block the game but for the last few seasons I’ve plunked down the thirty bucks or so for an MLB audio subscription. I figured I’d stop after Bob Uecker and Vin Scully retire but now that Jon Miller is off ESPN, well…
OK, OK, I love baseball and I love radio. There are worse habits, right?
One of my earlier childhood memories was the 1960 World Series – I’m not sure which game it was. The mind is an amazing thing that it can remember details from 50 years ago. My father was blind and listened to radio a lot (he was an amateur radio operator – going back to the 1930s). We were pretty poor, but something you don’t realize as you’re growing up.
We hopped on the streetcar – probably the 38 that used to run down West Liberty Avenue, perhaps the 42 Dormont (this was before they tore up the tracks and combined them into the 42/38). I clearly remember the P&LE station that used to cover the streetcar line just before it went over the Smithfield Street bridge. It was a very scary place for a 4 year old. We got on a “Forbes Field” special that ran out to Oakland, and let you off a block from the stadium. Right after Forbes Ave turns in from the river, there was a massive streetcar carbarn that certainly attracted my attention, even at that age. After the streetcars were removed from Oakland, the place was converted to a bus storage facility. It’s now a medical facility of some sort, although I see a few parts of the original facility – there is a power substation still there (streetcar systems were often owned by the power company – which was the case with Pittsburgh Railways.
Pittsburgh Railways was built by Andrew Carnegie’s companies. It’s not a coincidence that the terminus of most of the routes were at the steel mills. It was an effective way to get your workers to the factory without needing a car. Mellon Bank provided the money. If you know Pittsburgh, you know the Mellon / Frick / Carnegie empires ran the town, with Heinz and his pickles being another important employer.
Pittsburgh was always an odd place – because of its geography (before the Interstate highways were built and US Air made it their hub), there is basically no reason to go there unless you live there or are visiting someone there. The Pennsylvania Turnpike skirts around the city. Other than the Hilton downtown, when I was growing up there were almost no hotels or motels in the entire city.
We didn’t have tickets. We had a blanket and planted outselves on the ground in the park that was next to the stadium. Dad listened to the game on the radio, and we could hear the roar – but to a 4 year old who didn’t know what baseball was, it was pretty boring. I think I probably took a nap or nagged him with “Isn’t it over yet?”…
Later, I did have the chance to go to Forbes Field several times. Apparently, there was a tax benefit to donating seats to charity, so my father got seats several times right behind home plate from some blind group he was affiliated with in Oakland. I also went with a church group once – people stomping their feet in unison on metal seating is a unique experience.
To continue boring you with my Pittsburgh memories, my mom (who was a big baseball fan) dragged me out there probably at about 12 years old for an evening game, sitting in the cheap left field bleachers. It was a totally memorable night that people who were will never forget. It was a stunt put together called “Fan Night”. The premise was each person on the crown ws given a fan with the logo for a beer company (probably Iron City) to hold in your hand (like they had in churches before air conditioning). The fans were supposed to use their fans to “blow” the balls either fair or foul. Bob Prince on KDKA-AM was coordination when the fans should wave their fans.
At some point, the other team complained about the distraction, and people were told not to wave their fans. Bad idea. Fans started raining their fans down onto the field from the upper decks. They ended up suspending the game to pick up the fans and make it really clear that it had to stop or the game wasn’t going to continue.
Having grown up with that, I did go to Three Rivers Stadium two times for baseball. It was a horrible experience. You were so far away from the players, that they were just tiny dots (especially with my vision problems). It was hard to even see which bases had runners on them, let alone see the runner thrown out stealing second or the tag out at home plate. The whole thing was concrete.
As baseball learned the hard way, combined football and baseball stadiums are a really bad idea. I think there may be one or two of them left, but most have reverted to being baseball specific facilities, typically with a parking lot shared by the two stadiums, since it is rare for baseball and football to play on the same day (and can be scheduled around)
Finding things on the Internet prior to 1995 is sometimes difficult… I found someone who mentions it in a book. They indicated the pitcher on the mound who complained was Don Drysdale for the LA Dodgers. He also remembers the fans being provided by Iron City Beer.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pirates/questions/20020605bucqa.asp
That source says the game was in August 1965, which means I was 9 years old.
Kind of to tie this back to radio, a big point of this was to show how influential radio used to be. Bob Prince was able to cause fans all throughout the stadium listening on their radios to wave their fans in unison. I met Bob Prince once – it was at a gathering of the same blind group in Oakland.
Thanks for sharing those memories, Art. I find them interesting in many ways. I’ve been fortunate to visit many cities around the world and Pittsburgh is one of the very best, in my opinion.
And thanks to KDKA’s 50,000 watts, I was able to enjoy Bob Prince’s work on many summer nights here on the Jersey shore.