The End of Play by Play on Radio?

Many times I listened to Westwood One's broadcast of the NFL game while driving some back road.

 

What Matt brought up is the biggest problem with trying to simulcast TV for radio. The TV guys aren't describing the play by play for an audience that can't see what's happening. So as a listener, you have no idea what's going on. (Of course, adding a useless color guy has already taken PBP too far down that road for me to care.)

But I can see where a streaming feed will eventually have a bigger audience than terrestrial radio.

 

Flashing back to one Christmas Eve doing the over the river and through the woods thing and, seeking a respite from Christmas carols, found the Hawaii Bowl on the radio. But the WWL went cheap and put the TV commentary on radio instead of sending radio guys over, or, perhaps better, hiring a local crew. Dreadful.

 

There already are enough radio PBP guys who don't give the score often enough and the TV folks rarely do because it's on the screen. That is a big issue with simulcasts.

 

A few years ago, the Dodgers simulcast the first couple of innings. Just before the game started, Vin Scully said they were doing this and added that if you're watching on TV and it seems like he's talking too much, that's the reason.

 

Do you listen with a cell phone or a transistor radio? One reason for the eventual demise of over the air play by paly on radio is that people listen on a cell phones rather than transistors. It might be cheaper and easier to just distribute a game on the internet rather than building a network of radio stations.

 

Ads are different too. Listen to a game on radio, and everything is sponsored. The first pitch is brought to you by First National Bank, that steal brought to you by Bay Alarm, etc. TV slips in ads during action, but not as often because they can do it with graphics. That's a lot of revenue left on the table for some teams.

 

I rarely listened to Scully work a local broadcast because I lived out of range but he worked alone on Dodger broadcasts. When I did listen it seemed to me that he basically did a radio broadcast on television. And he was talented enough to excel.

 

He simulcast the first couple of innings, then the radio guys took over and he did TV by himself. In his latter years when he stopped traveling east, they had two crews.

 

The NBA pressured teams to get rid of simulcasts about 20 years ago. I think Hearn was the last doing simulcasts. I used to watch Kevin Calabro do simulcasts for Seattle and really enjoyed them. I never listened to George Blaha that much but he also did simulcasts for a long time.

I actually enjoyed the simulcasts of basketball more than most television only broadcasts. I generally do not recognize most of the players on court, especially on the opposing team. So I did not mind the announcer following the ball. And when something exciting happened the play by play guy could react to it.

Today I normally turn down the sound on a basketball broadcast. Bill Walton appears to be the 21st century model of color commentators. They just talk and talk about any damn thing.

 

One of the best things MLB did was gather up all the teams' radio rights and fold them into a streaming audio package.

Twenty years ago I screamed bloody murder over it, especially as clear-channel AMs were dumping baseball and teams were moving rights to FM, and I didn't want to pay for streams. Now I see that it was a genius stroke. I might use the At Bat app to stream 20 times a year, but they'll always get me for that $20.

There still is something pretty neat about pulling in the Yankees on WFAN or the Tigers on WJR (when they were there) or the Red Sox on WTIC or the Nats on 1500, though, even if the skywave is weak and every power pole known to man makes listening a chore.