Baseball On The Radio

It’s the same thing every season. This region prefers football to baseball, and I can’t say I don’t understand why. Most people don’t have the patience for baseball in our one-minute culture. And the fact that there were no professional sports of any kind in the PNW before the 1970s means collegiate sports (where there is no baseball) have a deep comparative history. But it’s frustrating that the most exciting part of a long baseball season (the stretch and post-season) coincides with the beginning of the football campaign, and that this preview and early-season period is given such clear preferential broadcast consideration on the local sports radio affiliate. I have this argument with them every October in some form. This was a FaceBook message from 2012

Dear KPUG 1170 The Sports Leader ( “my home for the Mariners, the All-Star game and the World Series” )–

Autumn is my favorite time of year. Temperatures are cooling at night, and the filtered light of a shortening afternoon casts a melancholy shadow across the bed of drying leaves. There is great optimism around the university as the students return to campus, no one having yet failed an exam or barfed in the dorm shower. Soon it will be Halloween.

What I love less about this time of year is chasing baseball on the radio. It’s the same thing every season. First, the Friday night NFL pre-season schedule pushes Mariners’ games to a “sister station” usually 930 and that works alright for a while. But then the college season starts, and on Saturdays even 930 seems to be more interested in football. Pretty soon Sundays are a washout, too, and eventually it seems like if there’s not some outer-county half-A high school game on Thursday night, then you guys would rather run Jim Plunkett’s Fantasy Football U-pick Rodeo than actually do what I thought you were contracted to do, which is broadcast live professional baseball.

Don’t get me wrong– I like football as much as the next agnostic. I just like baseball better. And I can dig that the football season is fresh, and that you’ve already broadcast 145 Mariners’ games, and that the team is likely 17 games under and there’s a bunch of call-ups playing, and that (most) people would rather hear Bob Robertson rasping on about the WSU Cougars or whatever the fuck it is he does– but it still seems like a gyp.

It seems like a gyp and a runaround, because I don’t think the sister stations always do what they say they’re going to do. Let’s face it– most sisters don’t. But your website isn’t usually accurate, and your deranged cousins at The Herald certainly can’t be trusted either.

I guess I’m just writing tonight in lower-case to let you know to expect a much more shrill message from me in the middle of October when there’s an NLCS game in extra innings going un-broadcast while two of your stations are running the same NFL week 5 preview syndicated crapping contest, and a third has a replay of the 2-hour postgame show from the Idaho State Normal vs. FaU game. I’ll be really wound up at that point.

Until then,

— Jeff Braimes, Bellingham