National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer

Chapter Six. Watching the Money: Baseball and Soccer Broadcasting

Robert Redford’s 1994 movie Quiz Show deals with the scandal surrounding the revelations that a popular game show of the 1950s, Twenty-One, was being fixed. In the movie, based on a true story, a congressional researcher uncovers a plot to fix the show involving TV executives at NBC and the corporate sponsor, Geritol, and forces them to testify before Congress. The researcher challenges the owner of Geritol, played by Martin Scorsese, in private to deny that he had fixed the show. Scorsese replies nonchalantly that, of course, the show was fixed, but that it didn’t matter. Even if the viewers knew, they wouldn’t care, and even if he weren’t allowed to fix it, he could produce the same effect simply by setting easier questions. Because, Scorsese explains, people were not watching because they cared about the questions; they just wanted to watch the money. Watching the money is an integral part of broadcasting, whether it be movies or sports. Most of us struggle to imagine what it would be like to earn as much as movie stars or sports stars, but we enjoy trying. Many people are infuriated by the large sums that these individuals earn, although really it is the medium that has created these excesses, not the stars. Stars have 146 chapter six Watching the Money Baseball and Soccer Broadcasting 06 8258-6 chap6 2/10/05 1:02 PM Page 146 Watching the Money 147 talents that are well beyond the range of most of us; that is why they are stars. What they are paid depends on how big an audience they can reach. One reason that Cameron Diaz or Tom Cruise, or Alex Rodriguez or David Beckham, would not have made so much money a hundred years ago is that the media did not exist to give so many people the opportunity to see what it is that makes them so special. From the point of view of sports, it is, above all, live broadcasting that counts. Sports offers the excitement of suspense. Without uncertainty of outcome, the attractiveness of watching sports is much diminished. In this chapter we explore how the broadcast media have developed in tandem with sports competition in baseball and soccer over the past century. Baseball Baseball cut its first media deal back in the 1890s. Western Union paid the National League for the right to relay game updates to saloons and poolrooms . Adumbrating concerns that would surface first with radio and then with television, some owners protested that providing such contemporaneous game information would diminish fans’ incentive to come to the ballpark . Nonetheless, the practice spread, and by 1913 Western Union paid each team $17,000 annually over five years for telegraph rights. Baseball’s growing popularity also caught the attention of the motion picture industry, which in 1910 offered baseball $500 for the right to film and show the World Series. In 1911 this fee increased sevenfold to $3,500. Deals with Hollywood produced little disagreement among the owners, but radio was another story. In early 1920 an executive from baseball’s New York Giants argued that radio coverage of games was “impossible and absurd [because] it would cut into our attendance. . . . We want fans following games from the grandstand, not their homes.”1 Still a majority of owners and Commissioner Landis were willing to try audiocasting on a trial basis. On August 5, 1921, the first radio broadcast of a game, between the Pirates and Phillies at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, was produced. Later that year the World Series between the Yankees and Giants was carried on radio via a relay: a sportswriter from Newark, New Jersey, reported the games from the Polo Grounds in Manhattan via telephone to WJZ, a Newark radio station, which then repeated the information over the air. The next year an estimated 5 million Americans listened to the live radio broadcast of the 06 8258-6 chap6 2/10/05 1:02 PM Page 147 148 National Pastime World Series, as the Giants defeated the Yankees for the second straight year. Some owners began to see radio not only as a source of revenue, but also as an effective means of promoting interest in their teams. In 1925 Cubs owner William Wrigley was so convinced of this advertising potential that he invited any Chicago station to broadcast his team without payment of a rights fee. Though...