In 1965, Michael Novak was a young academic living in Los Angeles when Stanford University hired him for a teaching position. He was a Dodgers fan, and as he wrote in his fine book, The Joy of Sports (1976), he moved his young family to Palo Alto only to discover that he couldn’t tune in the station in Los Angeles that broadcast the Dodgers, at least not if he used his in-home radio. The signal was just too weak.

I’ve often wondered how many baseball fans have had experiences like Novak’s, in which the signal was so weak that the game couldn’t be tuned in, or if it could be, a listener heard more static than words. Of course, you don’t hear about those experiences anymore, for the simple reason that modern technology has overcome what might be called the problem of weak signals.