When experts examine the decline of 21st-century Major League Baseball, it won’t just be performance-enhancing drugs or sign-stealing scandals that pointed the way. It will be teams’ decision to take baseball off the radio.
The news from Oakland on Tuesday shocked people for whom baseball and radio are the perfect partnership: The Oakland Athletics will not broadcast games on local radio in 2020. They become the first MLB team to remove play-by-play from their home radio airwaves.
“The primary motivation for this endeavor is around fan development, marketing, and really understanding how that can acquire new fans,” said the A’s president Dave Kaval.
I’m not buying it. This move will lose fans. By taking radio out of the mix, the A’s run the risk of alienating an audience that has been there for baseball since Aug. 5, 1921, when KDKA broadcast a game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Gone in Oakland will be the ability to switch on a car radio and tune into the game. Fans won’t be able to press a button on a radio at home, sit back and let the broadcast fill their dens.
I’ve visited parks from Oakland to Chicago to D.C., and almost every stadium has balky WiFi that gets harder to use the more people there are in the park. And streaming a game on your cellphone can quickly run down the battery. There’s simply no substitute for a radio.
While you can pay to hear games in your car on satellite radio, Oakland is not the rich city its San Francisco neighbor is. And it’s cumbersome to stream in many older cars, which require connecting a phone to the car radio, either through a cable or Bluetooth.
Also shut out are the people who work nights and weekends in jobs where they can’t use a phone but can switch on a radio.
The A’s, incredibly, are promoting the shift as a way to attract more listeners. Streaming-only broadcasts certainly fit the direction the MLB is taking. The MLB-TV streaming service had an 18 percent jump last year in paid subscriptions, while MLB At Bat, the sport’s phenomenally popular app, had 2 billion visits, as it touted in a news release.
“I get it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if more teams make this move,” Sports Illustrated staff writer Emma Baccellieri tweeted of the A’s move. “But it still makes me sad.”
If radio was just an afterthought these days, the move might be more defensible. But radio remains a powerful listener force. A July 2018 survey by Nielsen Scarborough found that baseball was the most listened-to professional sport on radio in the United States.
Critics complain that baseball games have gotten too slow, at an average of more than three hours per broadcast. But advertisers say the airtime gives them lots of exposure.
Young fans and their grandparents and everyone in between in the A’s hometown will not get to enjoy a simple pleasure experienced by millions of Americans: the comfort of baseball on the radio. If they get out of the habit, they might find that baseball no longer plays a role in their lives.
And that, not scandal, is the biggest danger to the game of all.