Time waits for no man, woman, or game. Even Friday night’s four-hour and 47-minute Cardinals-Dodgers endurance contest eventually ended. Maybe that’s why baseball, the game without a clock, with only innings and outs, tempts a fan to cheat time.
Any baseball junkie true to his addiction knows how baseball broadcasting distorts the time-space continuum. You can be in the kitchen cooking or cleaning up with the game on the radio, hear Matt Adams swat one into the bullpen, and still be able to dash into the next room to see it on cable television. Listening to KMOX, you have about 10 to 15 seconds after you hear something happen to get to a TV screen, depending on how prompt and attentive John Rooney and Mike Shannon were in announcing the Adams four-bagger.
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With the Cardinals in the playoffs, baseball fans have a third option: ESPN radio, on the FM dial at 101.1 The gap between hearing the national radio broadcast and seeing the drama on cable is about seven seconds. You have to move faster.
Why there are three speeds of delivery for media—think KMOX as a fastball, ESPN radio as a curve, and TV as a change-up—has to do with how each medium processes the signal, according to Bernard Feldman, professor and chairman of physics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
While there are differences in the technology of AM radio, FM radio, and cable television, Feldman says the gap between the audio description of the game and the visual depiction has little to do with distance or the broadcast waves themselves.
“There is more complicated circuitry in a FM radio,” Feldman says—but not enough to account for a seven- to eight-second difference from AM. (“AM” stands for amplitude modulation, by the way, and “FM” stands for frequency modulation.)
If the televised image is from satellite TV, beaming the signal to a satellite 25,000 feet above the Earth might be a factor, but radio and cable TV gaps likely have more to do with intentional delays programmed by the stations.
“All waves travel at the speed of light, so the delay is in the electronics,” Feldman says. “The speed of light is 186,000 miles a second, so a distance of 15,000 miles would just take a tenth of a second. Most of the delay would not be due to the transmission.”
By electronics, Feldman means the amplifier and circuitry involved in processing the signal, or intentional delays built into the delivery by the station for a variety of reasons, such as the ability to censor should the need arise.
Whatever the reason for the gaps, this is mostly good for fans—though it can lead to irritation and frustration. You have a choice between hearing what’s happening from one of two national crews, or you can stay with the homeboys, Rooney and Shannon, on AM radio.
Turning the sound down and leaving KMOX on is an acquired taste, as you need to adjust to being told what is going to happen well before it does. With this technology, Shannon can come off as Nostradamus (providing what he said happened actually did). If you can tear yourself away from the screen, it’s much easier to just listen to radio, then resort to visuals when a noteworthy event happens. It’s a self-produced, multi-media instant replay. That’s the quickest way to find out what happened, short of forking over money for a ticket to Busch Stadium.
Having the Cardinals in the playoffs is a mixed blessing, as there are two national crews that announce the games. Locals love it when out-of-towners praise the team—for example, when ESPN radio’s Rick Sutcliffe raved about Yadier Molina’s throw to nail Josh Harrison at second base in Game 4 of the National League Division Series. “No one else would have made that throw,” Sutcliffe enthused. We all knew that, but it was a boost to hear a stranger say it.
Conversely, St. Louisans can be touchy when national broadcasters have to at least feign impartiality, unlike Rooney and Shannon, who are on the Cardinals payroll. The television TBS duo for the Pirates-Cardinals series, Dick Stockton and Bob Brenly, drew heat from sports-talk callers for a variety of miscues and perceived biases when calling the game.
On a postgame KMOX call-in show, a caller hoisted the familiar theory that umpires and announcers call playoff games in favor of the team from the larger market. The trouble with that theory is that reality doesn’t fit the caller’s dim view of the calls in the Cardinals-Pirates games, as Pittsburgh is the smaller market.
Some approaches are different. The KMOX team barely mentioned the seemingly phantom tag by Molina from Carlos Beltran’s throw in Game 1 against the Dodgers; TV and national radio discussed it at length before deciding it was a decent call.
Flipping back and forth from radio to TV, local to national, several slants surface. There’s definitely an old-school radio vibe on KMOX that grates at being dictated to by TV. Rooney and Shannon don’t hesitate to take swipes at TV. The day before the National League Championship Series opener, Rooney was on KMOX complaining that the starting time of the first game was not set because TV hadn’t yet decided. During the weekend games, he made cracks about delays to accommodate TV during the game. On Saturday, Shannon said television hopes that Boston and Los Angeles win because they are the two largest markets. Seldom, if ever, do you hear local broadcasters admit that without big money from TV networks, the whole sport and all those who make a living at it, would be the poorer.
Television announcers, too, seem oblivious to other apparent realities. For instance, throughout the early stage of Saturday’s game, which started at 3 p.m., they talked to death about the impact of the “shadows” on the field that would affect pitchers and hitters. Never did they let on that the start time of the game was decided so that TV audiences would be maximized for the playoffs. If TV were less of a factor, the Cardinal game could have been played at noon or simultaneously with the American League playoffs.
Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, network telecasts of the World Series would routinely include a member of the local broadcast team. If that scheme were pursued today, either Shannon or Rooney would sit in with the national broadcast for a few innings. But that concept was dropped long ago.
When TV did use radio soundbites over the weekend, it was on the postgame show, and it was the venerable Vin Scully, the Dodgers announcer who’s been on the job even longer than Shannon. The 85-year-old Scully has been on the air for 64 years, Shannon for a mere 41. While Scully has a mellifluous voice and had broadcast in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, Shannon has a gruff timbre and is strictly indigenous to St. Louis. For Cardinals fans, Shannon is like a flawed childhood friend who you’ve spent so much time with, his shortcomings are overlooked or have morphed into endearing qualities. Yet when a newbie encounters this old friend, the reaction sometimes is, “What do you see in him?” or “Why do you like him?” For anyone asking that question, there often is not a better answer than, “You don’t know him like I do.” Heh-heh-heh.
Much has been said about Shannon’s surreal statements, or malapropisms, as if he is the Norm Crosby of baseball announcers. Actually, Shannon is funnier than Crosby ever was, though no one relied on Crosby to relay information that they cared about, such as the score, who’s on base, how many outs there are, and what inning it is. But that’s why Rooney is present as the Bud Abbott to Shannon’s sometimes Lou Costello, to tell us who’s on first.
Shannon, due to his recent heart surgery, is only doing the home games during the National League Championship Series. He’ll be missed because, after all, athletic theater is best when there is a levity and lightness attached to it.
That’s why the postgame TBS panel, headed by Keith Olbermann, works so well: It’s quick, sardonic, and sufficiently analytical, yet light. Thank Zeus that Olbermann left behind the ridiculous—politics—to move to something that’s at times sublime—sports. And who can’t love Pedro Martinez, with that accent, the smile, and his “Wacha wacha wacha” lines, referencing the Cardinals’ rookie ace.
On balance, the NLCS national broadcasters are upgrades from round one. Locally, Shannon will be missed during the L.A. games. (Why couldn’t he announce remotely by watching it on TV?) Fortunately, the after-game national interviews are better, rising above the usually useless questions of the game’s star: “How does it feel?” (Hint: If he won, it feels good; if he lost, it feels bad.)
So turn on the TV or the radio, and enjoy the ride.
Wacha, wacha, wacha, indeed.
