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Reviewed by:
  • Broadcasting Baseball: A History of the National Pastime on Radio and Television
  • James R. Walker
Eldon L. Ham. Broadcasting Baseball: A History of the National Pastime on Radio and Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 280 pp. Paper, $39.95.

In Broadcasting Baseball, Eldon L. Ham, adjunct professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, offers baseball enthusiasts an accessible popular history of the game’s ninety-year relationship with radio and television. The book provides a sound examination of big-league baseball on radio and television, grounded in an interesting retelling of some of Major League Baseball’s most significant events. Ham’s goal is not to produce a “chronology of baseball broadcasting” but an analysis of how it was embraced by “print and electronic sources” (3). Ham contextualizes this history in the development of broadcasting, a popular history of Major League Baseball as covered by the electronic media, and, to a lesser extent, American history since 1900. True to his goal, the author shuns a rigid chronological structure and organizes chapters around seventeen themes. Sample titles include “Watching Radio,” “Murderers, Monkeys, and Radio Men,” “The Game of Our Fathers,” “The Quantum Leap: Television,” and “Wagging the Dog.” As can be seen from this list, the titles are at times descriptive and at other times mysterious. They are on occasion misleading. For example, the twelve-page “Game of the Week” chapter has only a few paragraphs on the Game of the Week with most of this history dispersed among other chapters. Each chapter mixes descriptions of events from MLB’s broadcast history, baseball history, and American history in a complex and sometimes “stream of consciousness” structure. Connections between each element are occasionally obscure. For example, a relatively brief description of KDKA radio announcer Harold W. Arlin’s first broadcast of a major-league game (Pittsburgh Pirates vs. Philadelphia Phillies) segues into a general collection of information about the Pirates: a list of the team’s greatest players, that the team was the first to use canvas tarp for infield rain protection, that Babe Ruth’s final home run was at Forbes Field, and a longer discussion of Ralph Kiner’s career as a player and a broadcaster. The general connection between Arlin’s first broadcast and the Pirates is clear, but the connection to the specific “Buccoest” topics is less evident, except perhaps for Kiner’s career in announcing. The cohesiveness of individual chapters would benefit from more substantial forecasts at the beginning of each.

Given the focus on broadcasting and baseball, some important events are slighted, while significant but less central topics are given broader coverage. For example, radio’s broadcast of the first World Series is condensed to a few paragraphs, while the book’s coverage of the Dempsey-Carpentier “fight of the century” receives much more space. While there is no denying the significance [End Page 131] of radio’s first “fight of the century,” it is clearly less significant than baseball’s first broadcast World Series, given the focus of this book. Coverage of the other early radio broadcast of the World Series is also truncated, with as much focus on the on-field events of the series as upon the more significant evolution of radio technique and the medium’s growing coverage. While the author admirably attempts to contextualize the evolution of MLB broadcasting within the game’s history, at times, the balance could favor broadcasting baseball more strongly. Also reducing the value of the early radio history is the author’s focus on Chicago radio stations and MLB teams, while presenting only limited discussions of radio developments in the other nine MLB markets of the 1920s and 1930s.

Although not a problem for the more general reader, the author relies heavily on secondary sources (including one coauthored by this reviewer) and websites. Occasional newspaper accounts are also referenced. These sources are credible and provide enough information to cover the topic, but do not advance the scholarship in the history of broadcasting or baseball significantly and occasionally introduce inaccuracies. For example, in two places the author reports that Dizzy Dean’s first broadcast of the Game of the Week was in 1950...

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