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… Nobody had ever been called upon before to do such work. They had no past by which to judge the future. Read more: “Action Jackson: Watching Baseball Remotely, Before TV,” by Eric Zweigīroadcaster Red Barber once described how Graham McNamee - an unemployed opera singer in New York who became NBC’s national baseball announcer in the mid-1920s - helped break ground for him and other future baseball voices: “There was no lamp of experience for the pioneer broadcasters.Read more: “Before There Was Radio: How Baseball Fans Followed Their Favorite Teams, 1912-1921,” by Donna L.And some of these wireless enthusiasts were also baseball fans. There was a growing number of amateur wireless operators - what we today would call ham radio operators - most of whom still communicated by Morse code, but a few were experimenting with voice. That became a place for fans to socialize, as everyone stood on the street in front of their favorite publication, hoping for good news about the game.įrom 1912 onward, there was one other option, although it still wasn’t widely known or widely utilized. Some fans in bigger cities would go downtown and gather in front of the offices of the local newspaper, where they eagerly awaited the latest scores.
The best way, of course, was to go to the ballpark and watch the game in person, but not everyone could get the time off from work or afford a ticket. With no way to listen to the play-by-play at home - and no expectation that such a thing was even possible - you had to find other options when you wanted to know how your favorite team was doing. If you were a major-league baseball fan in the 1910s, you were living at a time before commercial radio had come along. Photo: George Westinghouse Museum Collection, Detre Library & Archives Division, Senator John Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh, PAīefore Radio: How Did Fans Follow Their Favorite Teams?
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