"Celebrating 90 Years of [World Series] Radio Broadcasts"

St. Louis Post Dispatch
October 18, 2011

"I watch a lot of baseball on the radio."
– Gerald Ford

Exactly 90 years ago—in October 1921—Americans heard the World Series on the radio for the very first time. Perhaps they 'saw" it on the newfangled talking box, too, for radio may be the most visual of all the electronic media, its magical word pictures luring our imaginations into the game itself.

When famed sportswriter Grantland Rice took the microphone for Game One in 1921, the World Series and baseball itself would never be the same again. Neither would America.

The New York Giants took on Babe Ruth's Yankees in 1921, the very first "Subway Series"—without the subway. Both New York teams played their home games in the same place, the cavernous Polo Grounds, a model that would be replicated decades later by New York's NFL Jets and Giants. This was also the first World Series the Yankees ever played. They lost to the Giants that year and again the next, but by 1923, playing in their own new Yankee Stadium, they finally would take their first series title. And all of it would be heard via the magic of radio, first by a few, then by millions.

The history of baseball broadcasting partly began as the result of a bet in 1912, when a young Westinghouse assistant named Frank Conrad built a crude operating receiver in his garage to win $5 by intercepting signals from the U.S. Navy. Inspired by his success, Conrad then built a transmitter and turned his garage into a virtual radio station that in 1916 would be assigned the call letters 8XK, which became Pittsburgh's KDKA in 1920. Not many listeners were tuned in because there were almost no receivers in existence, but Westinghouse got the message and began manufacturing radios to build an audience.

The first significant use of commercialized radio took place when KDKA announced the November 1920 presidential election returns to about 1,000 listeners. Warren G. Harding soon would be America's next president, and radio was about to propel America into accelerated age of real-time news and entertainment. In 1921, a curious engineer named Harold Arlin wandered into the KDKA studios to see what all the fuss was about. He emerged as the world's first baseball broadcaster. On Aug. 5, 1921, Arlin took a seat at Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, plopped a crude microphone onto the makeshift board across his lap, and began relaying the Pirates-Phillies game back to the studio where the game's events could be retransmitted almost in real time.

The 1921 World Series was a groundbreaking broadcast experiment covered by two radio stations. Game accounts were relayed back to KDKA, where results were broadcast to a handful of East Coast listeners. Fledgling New Jersey station WJZ did the same thing with Sandy Hunt from the Newark Sunday Call newspaper. No one paid any rights fees for the privilege, for radio had not yet discovered its true money machine potential. Within one year there were 30 radio stations operating in the United States, and by 1923, the total had exploded to 550. In 1934, the Ford Motor Company paid $100,000 to sponsor the World Series on radio. Today, just one 30-second World Series spot goes for more than $400,000.

Radio exploded across America, broadcasting the first-ever radio commercial in 1922, the 1925 Cubs-Pirates season opener, the 1925 Scopes monkey trial, the Charles Lindbergh cross-Atlantic Paris landing in 1927, the 1927 Jack Dempsey "long-count fight" and much more, all while inventing the sit-com as we know it with the forerunner to "Amos 'n' Andy" in 1926 and then "The Goldbergs" in 1929.

But nothing proliferated quite like baseball on the radio. The World Series audience went from a handful in 1921 to 5 million people in 1922. Announcer Grantland Rice was a prolific sportswriter who penned 22,000 columns, one of which christened the famous "Four Horsemen" reference to Notre Dame football's 1924 backfield. It may be his typewriter that is in the Hall of Fame, but it was his voice that helped launch baseball broadcasting and the voices to follow from Graham McNamee to Red Barber, Mel Allen, Bob Elson, Harry Caray, Jack Buck, Ernie Harwell, Vin Scully and all the rest.

Eldon L. Ham wrote the newly released "Broadcasting Baseball: A History of the National Pastime on Radio and Television" (McFarland & Co., 2011). He is an adjunct professor of Sports, Law & Society at Chicago-Kent College of Law and is the author of four sports books and numerous articles on sports in America.