Excerpt from Chapter Two of Play-by-Play,
"Romancing the Diamond"

Baseball had become the national sport during the 1900s while
radio was in a state of development. In 1920, KDKA in Pittsburgh
and WWJ in Detroit made the first commercial broadcasts, having
gone on the air after that year’s baseball season. The Westinghouse
Corporation built the one-hundred-watt radio station KDKA in a little
shack atop its nine-story factory—really, it was just a shack.

Americans bought or built radio receivers as fast as producers
could supply the parts. In 1921, Julius Hopp, a manager at Madison
Square Garden, came up with the idea of having WJY in New York,
which shared a frequency with WOR and another station, broadcast
the upcoming ‘‘Battle of the Century’’ for the heavyweight championship
between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. The promoters
broadcast the match into theaters, halls, and auditoriums. Despite the
difficulty of channeling radio signals into outside speakers in these
places, the plan worked, and WJY had a broadcast radius of two hundred
miles. Amateur radio clubs, wireless organizations, and other
groups promoted the venture.

The president of the National Amateur Wireless Association,
J. Andrew White, who had been an amateur boxer, was the broadcaster.
He practiced his commentary before the fight while throwing
punches in front of a mirror. On July 2, 1921, the fight took place
in New Jersey, where Dempsey knocked out Carpentier in the fourth
round. Some three hundred thousand fans heard the broadcast. Some
audiences had to have the event read by wire report when the speakers
failed, and the transmitter blew just as the fight ended.

That same year, the Newark Sunday Call broadcast the first World
Series game from the Polo Grounds. The newspaper sent a reporter to
the game to send a play-by-play over a telegraph line to the Sunday
Call offices. The plays were handed to the sports editor, George
Falzer, who read them into a telephone line to the newly established
station of the Westinghouse Corporation at the corner of Plane and
Orange Streets. This telephone broadcast directly over the air occurred
on the second licensed station in America, WJZ.

Following farther down on the radio club report was a picture of
Falzer holding a telephone of the day, keeping the earpiece to his ear
while speaking into the microphone at the top of a foot-long stand.
Evidently, they realized that they would have a live broadcast by just
telephoning directly to the radio station rather than going through the
newspaper office.

There was another claim by the Newark News Radio Club report
that WJZ broadcast the first intercollegiate football by radio play-byplay
in October of 1921. There was a picture of the announcer standing
in what they called the ‘‘press gallery’’ with two other gentlemen
calling the game. I always stood while broadcasting football. There
was better breathing and better sighting, especially at my height.

Another first for Newark took place on May 6, 1922, when the
Newark Sunday Call installed a radio transmitter on an automobile
sent out to broadcast news from the scene. There is a picture in the
Newark Radio Club report showing a man identified as Emory Lee,
radio inspector, measuring the wavelength of the transmitter, which
rested on the engine hood of the big four-door sedan. The antenna,
four or five lines, was strung between posts mounted on the front and
rear bumpers.

A hundred thousand radio receivers were produced in 1922 and
five hundred thousand the following year. By 1924, all kinds of programs
were broadcast around the country, and baseball was one of
the major attractions in every city with a team. Listeners set the home
receiver antenna just right to pick up out-of-town baseball broad-
casts. Most of the earlier sports broadcasts had been sent by either
code or telephone to the radio station and then rebroadcast. The first
collegiate football game between Texas A&M and the University of
Texas was broadcast November 25, 1920, on A&M’s WTAW, then
operating on an experimental license, call letters 5XB. The transmission
was in code. Remote broadcast equipment that could be connected
to a telephone line at a stadium was cumbersome, heavy, and
difficult to maintain, but upgrades were being invented as quickly as
brilliant engineers could put them together.

KDKA’s first full-length live sports event was a fight between
Johnny Ray and Johnny Dundee at Motor Square Garden in Pittsburgh
April 11, 1921. The Pittsburgh Post sportswriter Florent Gibson
reported live from ringside. KDKA’s first live baseball game
broadcast boomed out on August 5, 1921. The National League field
of the Pittsburgh Corsairs was connected by wire to the radio station,
and Harold W. Arlin announced an 8 to 5 win over Philadelphia. In
the fall of that year, Arlin broadcast the University of Pittsburgh–West
Virginia University game live on KDKA.

WRR-Radio in Dallas, on the air March 1922, was the first station
in Texas but not the first to broadcast sports. Fort Worth and the Star
Telegram’s WBAP went on the air on May 2, 1922, and on August
30 of that year accomplished a two-man broadcast of a crucial series
between the Fort Worth Panthers and the Wichita Falls Spudders. The
Panthers, managed by Jake Atz, were just two games back of the leading
Spudders, with a five-game series remaining.

The radio station stationed a man in the park, possibly the ‘‘press
box,’’ where he relayed each play by telephone to an announcer in the
downtown studios. You wonder why they couldn’t have just plugged
the phone line into the transmitter, but they couldn’t or didn’t think
of it.

Fort Worth won the first game 6 to 2, and WBAP followed the
same procedure for the second game, which the Panthers won 7 to
3. The radio-listening public, probably not a sizeable majority of the
population then, reacted so positively that the radio station completed
a marvel of engineering. According to Bill O’Neal in his book,
The Texas League: 1888–1987, Century of Baseball, WBAP laid eight
thousand feet of telephone cable from the Panther Park to its studios
in the Star Telegram newspaper building for the third game in 1922.

Harold Hough was the intrepid announcer who sat on an orange
crate somewhere behind home plate and broadcast a 5 to 0 Panther
shutout of Wichita Falls. There was a Saturday doubleheader scheduled
where the Panthers could clinch the Texas League pennant. In
a decision similar to some that modern management decrees, WBAP
broadcast only the second game, a 4 to 0 Fort Worth victory. After all
that energy laying more than a mile of cable to broadcast the games
live, management opted to carry one game.

Seventy-two years later, it is still apparent that planning ahead for
the latest technological innovations was absent in some places—
particularly Johnson City, Tennessee.
 

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(click here to read excerpt 1 from the book)
(click here to read excerpt 2 from the book)
 

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