Book Review: Crack of the Bat, by James R. Walker

Abstract

James R. Walker Crack of the Bat. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 305 pp.Walker's comprehensive history is of the often-times stormy relationship between the radio broadcast industry and Major League Baseball (MLB). Walker offers a detailed chronology of that history, beginning with the broadcast of a major league game on August 5, 1921, on KDKA, Pittsburgh. KDKA engineer Harold Arlin gave the first play-by-play commentary that afternoon during a Pirates-Phillies game. That broadcast ushered in the beginning of the marriage between baseball and broadcasting, a relationship that has been tumultuous throughout its history, but one that helped to shape both the sport and radio industry.Walker focuses on MLB team owners, the MLB commissioner's office, and the pioneers of radio, who negotiated how the sport would be distributed to a public eager for access to the national pastime. There were visionaries, such as the Chicago Cubs' owner William Wrigley and Cubs President Bill Veeck, who saw the advantages of broadcasting games. They viewed radio as a vital instrument for increasing interest in the team and for fueling game attendance. Other owners, however, saw radio (at least initially) as a threat to box office receipts. Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert and the team's Chief Executive Ed Barrow were among the majority of major league owners and representatives who shunned radio and took actions to keep broadcasters out of their ballparks. The Yankees formed a pact with the other New York teams (the Giants and Dodgers) to initiate a 5-year ban on radio broadcasts of games. World Series games, however, were different, and MLB Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis appointed himself chief negotiator in striking deals with sponsors, such as the Ford Motor Company and the Gillette Safety Razor Company, to be among the first to advertise via World Series broadcasts.As Walker explains, commercialization and sponsorships were major forces in the proliferation of baseball on the radio. Until night baseball became standard in the Major Leagues, sponsorships were limited to the audience that MLB daytime broadcasts were reaching: women and children. It is no wonder, then, that General Mills cereals were the major sponsors of MLB games on the radio. MLB and its broadcasters, however, desired another demographic, and that was men, ages 25 to 54. But day jobs kept many in that demographic from listening to MLB broadcasts and kept potential sponsors who targeted that demographic from supporting those broadcasts. Those sponsors included cigarette makers and breweries, and those sponsors grew as night baseball expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s. Although baseball broadcasts became increasingly commercialized, legal, social, and technological developments also affected the baseball-radio dyad. Baseball's anti-trust exemption, the Radio Act of 1927, the Communications Act of 1934, the Great Depression, digitization, and the web, all affected the ways in which radio delivered MLB. …