The A’s: Don’t try to listen up
By Art Spander
MESA, Ariz. — My first memories of baseball came from what I heard — on the radio.
Nights I would listen to Bob Kelly doing the Angels — the L.A. Angels of the Pacific Coast League. Lucky Lager beer was the sponsor, and Kelly’s home run call, borrowing the product’s advertising, was, “It’s mild and mellow.”
Baseball always has been a game of voices.
Vin Scully arguably became the most important member of the Dodgers when the majors moved West in 1958.
Maybe it was because of the fans’ ignorance (who’s that Wally Moon guy anyway?). Whatever the reason, the Dodgers felt compelled to set up small loudspeakers in an area of the Los Angeles Coliseum — where the team played from 1958 through ’61 — so people could listen as they watched.
Baseball and radio, radio and baseball, inseparable, Red Barber (“Back, back, back…”) and Mel Allen (“How about that?”).
By the Bay, Russ Hodges (who while in New York in 1951 shouted into our souls, “The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant”) and Lon Simmons; Bill King; Hank Greenwald; Al Michaels; now for the Giants, Jon Miller and Dave Fleming; for the A’s, Ken Korach and Vince Cotroneo.
Except we never again may hear Korach and Cotroneo. The A’s will not be on the radio. At least the way they and other teams always have been, via on-air broadcasts, clicking the on-off switch.
Which is unfortunate. And idiotic. As the headline in the Washington Post a few days ago declared, referencing the Astros cheating, “Scandals won’t kill baseball. Kicking the games off radio just might.”
Since they arrived in Oakland in 1968, the A’s have had a torturous connection to radio. They didn’t like the station. The station didn’t like them. Sometimes the signal was so weak it wouldn’t get out of the Coliseum parking lot. In 1978 they were broadcast on the Cal university station by a 20-year-old student — who is now president of the Giants, Larry Baer.
But beginning this season of 2020, the Athletics, who begin their exhibition schedule on Friday against the Chicago Cubs, will be available online. Meaning, for most of us, they won’t be available.
It’s the future, says Dave Kaval, the A’s president. Of what, a city without baseball?
The game, like every other product, must be sold constantly. Every mention on radio is the advertising, paid or unpaid, that keeps everyone attuned.
Back in the 1980s, NBC-TV televised an NFL game that had no announcers. That lasted one game.
This isn’t a secret society. It’s tough enough finding games when we know they’re being broadcast. It will be impossible if they are only being streamed.
Take out the ”r” and that will be the reaction, steamed, of the guy who takes his family to an A’s game, leaves in the eighth of a 5-5 tie because the kids have to go to bed and then is unable to find out what happened until he gets home and turns on the TV news.
“The primary motivation for this endeavor is around fan development, marketing, and really understanding how that can acquire new fans,” said Kaval, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
The odds are they’ll drive away old fans.
In an essay last summer in the National Review, Rich Lowery wrote, “Baseball on the radio remains an iconic American sound.”
Except for the Oakland A’s.
You can get the games on your phone, probably if you have an understanding of quantum physics. Baseball is simple. All you need is a bat and a ball. The ability to hear a game should not be complex.
The Raiders have moved. The Warriors have moved. Now the only team left in Oakland, the A’s, has moved its broadcasts to a place where most of us can’t listen to them.