The Baseball-Radio War, 1931-1935

The emergence of radio in the 1920s as a significant new medium of mass communication was greeted by most Major League Baseball (MLB) owners with suspicion and apprehension. Owners feared the new medium would reduce attendance and compromise their symbiotic relationship with the newspaper industry. East Coast and American League teams were especially antiradio, while some clubs in the Midwest, especially the Chicago Cubs, were proradio. Initially, teams received limited, if any, rights fees to allow the broadcasting of their games, so there was little economic incentive to let radio in the ballpark gate. However, a few forward-thinking owners saw radio as a positive promotional device that could sell baseball to new customers, including women working in the home. It might also charm children, spawning the next generation of fans. Since the games were played during the day, women and children were the major groups in the radio audience. As the 1930s dawned, the Great Depression forced owners to consider new options for replacing revenues lost from declining attendance. At the same time, some sponsors, General Mills in particular, aggressively promoted the sponsorship of baseball on the radio to sell breakfast cereal (e.g., Wheaties) to children. The growing war between some baseball owners and radio came to a head at a series of league meetings in the 1930s. These pivotal confrontations between the lords of America's national pastime and the medium that millions used every day to pass the time would change the relationship between baseball and radio, establishing a blueprint that would carry over to television.

As wars go, even metaphoric ones, the baseball-radio war of the 1930s was a minor skirmish. Unlike the war on poverty, the war on drugs, or the war on terrorism, the baseball-radio war would not receive much national attention. A few articles in the New York Times, Broadcasting, and the Sporting News would suffice to cover the conflict. But like many actual wars, the baseball-radio war was never officially declared and was part of a larger confrontation.

Newspapers vs. Radio

The baseball-radio war of the early 1930s was a minor battle in the larger press-radio war. Newspapers owned the news prior to the emergence of radio in the 1920s. Competition among local papers was fierce, but limited to members of the daily print club. Radio news grew slowly in the 1920s. NBC's news bureau consisted of one reporter as late as 1933. Radio news was generally part of a station's "sustaining time," unsponsored programming typically offered to please federal regulators, and provided programming to maintain the station's signal and presence in the market. But newspapers were still afraid of the new voices from the ether. Radio could cover news as it happened from the scene and certainly before a print version, even an extra, could appear. Radio could always scoop the printed word. In December 1933, the newspaper industry (AP, UP, INS, American Newspaper Publishers Association) and the radio industry (NBC, CBS, National Association of Broadcasters) all but shut down radio news when they signed the Biltmore Agreement at the hotel of the same name in Washington, DC. The agreement was decidedly one-sided, with major concessions from the radio industry. In the future, radio news would have to be unsponsored (therefore unprofitable), supplied by the newspaper industry's Press-Radio Bureau, and limited to times that would insure that morning and evening newspapers would always present the news first. The radio industry agreed to this outlandish restraint of trade because news was not seen as profitable and newspapers controlled the major wire services. The Biltmore Agreement began to unravel almost immediately; by the end of 1934, independent (non-network) stations, who had not signed the agreement, began to program news extensively and profitably.¹

Within this context, baseball's radio-coverage restrictions were clearly supported by newspapers and were part of the print media attempts to control its competition. Owners were aware of the value of newspaper publicity in selling tickets, while, in a classic symbiotic relationship, newspapers sold more papers by extensively covering the national pastime. This...