Crack of the Bat: A History of Baseball on the Radio by James R. Walker (review)

For many baby boomers (like this reviewer), the best way to enjoy a baseball game is listening to it on the radio. The next best thing to a baseball radio broadcast is reading a good book about the national pastime, such as James R. Walker’s most recent effort. In this book, Walker, professor emeritus of communications at Saint Xavier University, evokes the joy and thrill of hearing the smack of the ball as it pops into the first baseman’s mitt on a long throw from the shortstop across the diamond and the unmistakable and unique sound of the crack of the bat as horsehide meets a Louisville Slugger. The author combines impeccable research, vast knowledge, and nostalgia to produce a remarkable contribution to baseball history and scholarship.

Walker traces the history of baseball on the radio from the first broadcast in the 1920s to today’s digital transmissions. But as is appropriate for a sport with revered traditions, he gleefully points out that the more things change, the more they stay the same: in spite of new technologies and the challenges they bring, a receiver manufactured nearly one hundred years ago can still pick up a baseball broadcast on the am frequency. Deftly and skillfully, Walker profiles baseball’s pioneer radio announcers and their modern counterparts, describing and critiquing their broadcasting styles. With meticulous erudition, Walker analyzes the twenty-year radio war between owners who warmly embraced the new medium, like Chicago’s William Wrigley and Bill Veeck Sr., and those who stubbornly opposed it, like the Yankees’ Jacob Rupert and Ed Barrow. Other topics that receive the author’s scholarly attention include the meteoric rise and fall of Gordon McLendon’s Liberty Broadcast System, the emergence of team radio networks, the commercialization of baseball broadcasts, and game re-creations. Throughout the book, one theme emerges: there is a symbiotic relationship between the growth of baseball broadcasts and the growth of radio communication itself. As the radio broadcast more and more games, hundreds of thousands of people, then millions, then tens of millions, became new and permanent radio listeners.

Walker successfully places the evolution of baseball broadcasting within the broader context of American history. For example, he explains how the Great Depression, World War II, and the Federal Judiciary affected the game on the radio and baseball itself. From 1921 to 1933 the World Series was broadcast as a national public service without commercial sponsorship. Then in September 1934, with baseball reeling from the devastating effects of the Depression, Commissioner Landis sold commercial rights to the Series to the Ford Motor Company for $100,000. Landis’s decision was a turning point in the relationship between baseball and radio: “His contract with Ford made the World Series too important to be unsponsored. There would be no turning back. The era of sports as public-service programming faded to silence” (105). During the war, more games than before were played at night. As a result, sponsorship of games on the radio changed as the demographics of listeners changed. Prior to 1941, the principal sponsor of baseball on the radio was General Mills, advertising Wheaties cereal, the “Breakfast of Champions,” to women and children in the home. During the war, tobacco companies; breweries; and gas, oil, and automobile companies became leading sponsors, peddling their products to men home from a day’s work. In 1938, a federal judge in Pittsburgh declared that game broadcasts were not a public service but a property right owned by the teams. This decision eventually opened the floodgates, making “electronic-media revenues . . . as significant as ballpark attendance. . . . For baseball’s bottom line, [this decision] may well have been the most consequential court case in baseball history” (165–66).

Walker’s study of baseball on the radio is really a history of major-league baseball on the radio. He makes only scattered references to the minor leagues. This...