Before moving to Richmond, Virginia — where I was born — my dad spent a few years living in Pittsburgh, working as a trust office for a bank there. During that time, he became a die-hard Pittsburgh Pirates fan. So, as incongruous as it might sound, I grew up in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, rooting for a team from up north.
As a result, all through my childhood, I was regaled with tales of listening to Pirates’ games via KDKA. I learned that the city had “wired” the long tunnel under Mount Washington with the KDKA signal so that fans could listen to World Series games while stuck in traffic. And I learned that on clear summer nights, you could listen to KDKA as far away as Charlotte, NC.
Through college and shortly after college, when I was on the road a lot doing politics, KDKA, WFAN, WABC and other 50,000 watt AM giants got me through many late nights behind the wheel. Baseball is made for radio, and the playoffs and World Series even more than the regular season.
But today, after 51 years, the Pirates announced that they were dropping KDKA and moving over to an FM station owned by radio behemoth Clear Channel. Apparently, the new station has better demos.
The Pirates were once a proud franchise. Through the 60s and 70s, they were a national league powerhouse. They returned to form in the late 80s and remained dominant in their division until the mid-90s. But over the last few years, they’ve become a joke. And the move to drop venerable KDKA in favor of a station with younger demos proves just how stupid and out of touch current ownership really is.
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September 13, 2006 - 1:39 pm
Xm Radio is the best thing going for baseball. You get every game broadcast with the home team announcers. Just like you remember the long-late night drives listening to AM baseball. You could even listen to all the Pirates games if you want, but I can’t see why you would.
September 13, 2006 - 4:25 pm
My dad grew up in northern West Virginia and has the same memories of listening to KDKA’s Pirates broadcasts. I have similar recollections of my team, the Atlanta Braves, and its former 50,000-watt blowtorch of a station, WSB, keeping me company as I drove around in Washington D.C. or up and down the East Coast. I even got the broadcast in Maine one summer, much to everyone’s surprise in the car. Like the Pirates, though, the Braves abandoned WSB for the local classic rock FM station and an AM affiliate that can barely make it outside 285 (Atlanta’s Beltway). Not only that, but Time Warner, the Braves’ current corporate caretaker, sold the television stations that carry their games locally (when they’re not on TBS), and those stations now use two lame announcers, not the classic quartet that were the voice of the Braves for their entire 14-year division championship run. Time and again, corporate suits seem to willfully dismantle the very traditions that made baseball such an essential part of American culture. Some have called this the golden era of baseball, but when steroids taint the recordbooks, the bottom 10 payroll teams (1/3 of the league) have no hope of making the playoffs, and Yankee Stadium/KDKA/Skip-Don-Pete-Joe are being left in the dust in the name of progress, I can’t get on board with that assessment.