003 Baseball on the Radio

In this short episode Scot goes over the perfect pairing of Baseball and the Radio, exploring a bit of its history as well as his history with it.  

 

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AI-Generated Transcript:

 

Speaker 1: 0:23

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen, and this is a podcast where I catalog some of the perfect pieces of life, one by one. Join me each episode as I examine something that I or someone else considers perfect. This is a quick episode I wanted to record and get out before the end of the month. Today's topic is sort of a Venn diagram, and I love Venn diagrams, but that's a separate issue. It's a Venn diagram of two things and we are focusing specifically on the area where they overlap. Today's perfect thing is baseball on the radio. Researching this episode, I discovered that at the time of recording August of 2021, I'm at the 100 year anniversary of the month of the very first time baseball was ever on the radio. That event happened on August 5th of 1921 on radio station KDKA of Pittsburgh, when Harold Arlen announced a game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies live. They even invented their own microphone out of a modified telephone to be able to catch the noise of the game. Football baseball initially resisted the radio. The owners were slow to adopt. They worried that people being able to get the games for free would cut into their attendance and no one would go to the games in person anymore. That first year, the World Series was actually broadcast by announcers reading telegram updates rather than being at the game themselves. It didn't cut into attendance, though it did the opposite. With greater access, the popularity grew. You had a monopoly on this market for about 18 years, when it was the only way to experience a game apart from being in the stands. But August 26th 1939, the first baseball game was broadcast on TV and baseball entered another level of pop culture awareness. Tv is great for most sports, but I think baseball and the radio are perfectly suited for each other. You can catch a game live at the ballpark or on TV, but catching the game on the radio has always been my favorite way to enjoy baseball. Likewise, I've heard other sports on the radio too. Growing up, I can remember hearing Chiefs football games, kc Blades hockey and occasionally even Chicago Bulls closest NBA team to KC basketball games, all broadcast at different times, but they just didn't mesh as well with the audio only version as baseball did. There was always either too much happening or too little, but baseball happens to have the luxury, in my opinion, of being the perfect speed for an audio only experience. With football it feels like there are too many people in motion at once and an announcer is going to have to leave something out. With basketball there are fewer players on the court but action is happening so quickly and in so many places that you simply have to leave out some of what's happening there as well. Baseball feels like it's happening at the exact pace. The announcers need to describe every piece as it's happening and with just a little bit of knowledge of the structure and rules of baseball it allows you to visualize the whole game perfectly. When a TV broadcast zooms in for a close-up, it is choosing to exclude everything else going on for the benefit of that close-up shot. But the radio announcer is able to act as a conductor of sorts, giving you both the melody and the accompaniment all at once, more like a symphony. A baseball announcer had the ability to do what I'd never heard on the radio to just take long pauses. For normal radio announcers that would be just silence, dead air, the thing every disc jockey and talk radio host was conditioned to fear the most. But baseball has all these built-in ambient noise and the best broadcasts make sure to capture it along with everything else. There's the crowd, the organ, the garbled stadium announcer bleeding through or the pop song being played for the fans, the occasional crack of the bat or sound of birds vendors yelling in the stands and it was always going on in the background. It lets them match the pace of the game, and listening always reminded me of easy summer conversations with friends, where sometimes a sentence could trail off and then come back after a short hiatus and that's just the pace we're going. I loved soaking in all those extra sounds as I found my thoughts wandering to different places during those times. For me, hearing baseball on the radio takes me back to three different times in life. Most recently, it makes me think of one of the cars I drove early on that had only a radio and the FM. Half of that was broken so I was only listening to AM stations on the drives I took in it. It was the Midwest, so I was in the car a lot and that meant discovering weird and wonderful things like the Phil Hendry show and Art Bell talking to people about aliens on coast to coast AM at 2 in the morning, but also lots of baseball games with the sun setting and the windows rolled down, driving across deserted Kansas highways with the sounds of Royals baseball coming through 980 on my AM radio. It's just the best. Denny Matthews is the Kansas City Royals' announcer and he's been with the team since its first season in 1969. He announced all the way through my childhood and still announces them today, so he is the voice I associate most with baseball. Radio, like baseball, is also regional right, so where you are it might have been other famous voices like Vince Gowney or Harry Carey Jack Buck. Whoever it was, it became a familiar voice you trusted to paint a beautiful picture for the next few hours. The second place it takes me is to ages 12, 13, 14, pushing a lawnmower back and forth over the neighborhood on lawns and humid weekend afternoons with a tape player slash radio on my hip. A lot of times it may have had a cassette of Danny Elfman's Batman Return soundtrack, but when the Royals were playing I'd be listening to the game. I've always had an easier time doing chores with some sort of separate audio. Sometimes music used to be talk radio or audiobooks, now it's mainly podcasts. But it helps me just switch to autopilot while walking back and forth with a mower and instead exists fully inside the reality of whatever I'm listening to. Baseball worked beautifully in that regard. I stopped mowing lawns as soon as I could drive to a different job, but I would have tapped out a lot sooner if I didn't have these audio escape hatches while I was mowing. The main place that baseball and the radio takes me back to is my grandparents house. I grew up about 45 minutes away from where my father's parents lived in Independence, missouri. I have one older sister, so from the earliest I can remember it was already an established pattern for my grandparents to take each of us for one week at a time to stay with them. My grandparents get one on one time with each of us, while my parents got to do the same with the other kid, and it gave my sister and I some time apart from each other too. We did this every summer of my elementary school years, as far as I can remember. Now that I'm an adult, I take for granted that I can fall asleep practically anywhere, but as a kid, unfamiliar surroundings can be hard to ignore, and at my grandparents house there was a lot of unfamiliar. There was a cowboy lamp shaped like a stirrup, a wall with a bunch of pictures of geese beautifully painted on various sized circular saw blades, and a machine in the basement that you leaned on while it jiggled instead of doing exercise. But any night they were on, and in the summer that was often, one of my grandparents would turn the radio on and maybe, while working on a jigsaw puzzle, I'd fall asleep listening to the familiar sounds of the Royals in the baseball game. I could completely see, even with closed eyes as I drifted to sleep.

Speaker 2: 11:04

Here's the O1 pitch swing and a foul, and again the Royals are one strike away. And how about the guy in the mound right now?

Speaker 1: 11:12

The Royals wondered if he could. Once in a while we might even go to a game and if it was a late one or not, a particularly competitive one, which, as a Royals fan, you just have to make peace with sometimes. But we could find ourselves in the car driving out to beat the traffic or preserve my bedtime when I was really young and listening to the end of the game over the radio that way. But I remember so many other activities playing croquet, frisbee, grilling up hamburgers and hot dogs or catching lightning bugs in a jar, where the sounds of a game coming out of the radio were as much a part of the fabric of the moment as the locusts and the frogs. Baseball on the radio is just a space and time machine, depositing me in memories from before, giving me the feeling of those slow summer nights, no matter when or where I hear it. In a world where the pace of everything seems to be increasing all the time, it's nice to go back to a thing that feels exactly the same as it did when I was a kid, the same as when my dad was a kid. To me it's just perfect. And with that, baseball on the Radio becomes the third entry into the Perfectorium, the index of perfect things. This episode was recorded and mixed at Morena Studios in Oakland, california. I'm working on some more episodes right now, so if you don't want to miss them, be sure to subscribe. And if you're enjoying these and want to drop the Perfect Show, a perfect rating or review, please do that on Apple, google, spotify or whatever you're using. Once again, the Perfect Show site is at PerfectShowsite. That's a site TE. Email any comments, music or other things to PerfectShowShowcom and connect on Twitter and Instagram to use your name PerfectShowShow. And, as always, if you need to use this podcast in a high stakes gambling situation where some bombastic high roller has laid out a ridiculous sum of money claiming that there's no such thing as a perfect show and my money says none of yours can prove any different and you walk up all cool Miami Vice and you're like I'll take that bet. Then you reach into your pocket all casual and hold up your smartphone where this podcast is playing. Then the other guy falls to his knees yelling no, while you saunter off with a briefcase full of his money. Well then, by all means, you have my full permission. Anyway, until next time, I'm Scott Moppen, and thanks for listening to the Perfect Show. I'm gonna eat 50 eggs.