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.
Satellites circling the globe can broadcast programming at great distances, and fans signed up for Major League Baseball’s Gameday Audio can receive its most important programming—live audio broadcasts of MLB games—via their smart phones or laptops or other devices. Remarkably, fans have access to live audio broadcasts of every major league game, both regular season (162 games) and postseason (as many as 20 games).
A subscription to Gameday Audio is available through mlb.com. It costs $19.99 a year, surely one of the best buys in shopping history. And because satellites reach where the fans are, which is all over the world, MLB now offers an international service.
MLB also offers a television subscription—mine for this year cost $109.00. Some television games are blacked out for various business reasons. But when that happens, MLB subs in the live audio. What this means is that while the television broadcast of a game is not always available to subscribers to MLB.tv, the live audio of any game always is.
Baseball on radio has been a tradition for more than 80 years, teaching the elements and sounds of the game. But not until the launch of MLB.tv 2004 has live audio of every game been made available, admittedly at some cost to the taker, but hardly enough to matter. We baseball fans have never had it so good insofar as being able to tune in games, and to tune in as many as we want to listen to.
