THE CHICAGO CUBS ARE ON THE AIR!

A HISTORY OF CUBS BROADCASTING Copyright 2007 Stu Shea All Rights Reserved

The first major-league baseball game ever broadcast on radio was Friday, August 5, 1921’s Pittsburgh Pirates–Philadelphia Phillies tilt at Forbes Field. The host Pirates won 8-5 as Harold Arlin laid down the action on Pittsburgh’s KDKA for the few people in the world who owned the equipment needed to listen.

That fall, radio fans heard the Yankees-Giants World Series over Newark’s WJZ, on KDKA, and on Boston’s WBZ (all stations owned by Westinghouse). The following year’s series, again featuring the Yankees and Giants, was also broadcast.

Catering to the universal love for baseball, radio stations all over the land soon began reading ticker-tape results from their local teams’ ballgames, and such broadcasts were almost immediately seen as enticements. A July 10, 1925 Washington Post article noted that the Saks clothing store at Seventh St. and Pennsylvania Avenue had set up a loudspeaker in front of the main entrance tuned to station WRC, which broadcast “returns,” as they were then called, of road games played by the Senators.

Baseball fans might be surprised to find that the most significant broadcasting city in the history of the national game is Chicago, rather than New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Boston, or Philadelphia. The history of Chicago Cubs radio and television is, in many ways, the history of baseball broadcasting itself.

GIVE IT AWAY

The Cubs, encouraged by owner Phil Wrigley, made it known in the early 1920s that they welcomed stations who wished to broadcast their games on the radio. Wrigley felt that the publicity would be good for his team—a belief from which many other owners of baseball teams recoiled in horror.

Sen Kaney was among the first stars of radio, operating in Chicago, a town that took to the medium like nobody’s business. Originally employed by KYW, Kaney on April 19, 1924 transferred to WDAP (soon renamed WGN, and then, as today, operated by the Chicago Tribune) as program director and an on-air personality.

In the first-ever local radio transmission of major league baseball, WGN carried the entire Cubs–White Sox 1924 post-season city series, with Kaney sitting on the Wrigley Field rooftop, next to the press area, to describe the action. While Kaney was no baseball expert, he is said to have been witty and engaging on the air.

Opening day, April 14, 1925, marks the first regular-season broadcast on WGN, with Quin Ryan replacing Kaney on the Wrigley Field grandstand roof for an 8-2 win over visiting Pittsburgh. The few existing sound bites of Ryan, a local writer and boxing expert, reveal a genial presence with a friendly tone.

(That fall, Ryan and Graham McNamee, in a first, aired coast-to-coast national broadcasts of the Pittsburgh-Washington World Series on WGN, which would continue to air World Series contests for many years. In 1931, Commissioner Landis granted just two radio networks—NBC and CBS—permission to broadcast baseball’s fall classic, and WGN picked up NBC’s feed featuring the popular McNamee.)

The following year, 1926, WGN and Ryan contracted to air every Saturday afternoon Cubs home game as well as the Opening Day tilt. More games were added during the season, however, as the Cubs proved a popular program.

In an indication of the utter seriousness in which baseball was held at the time, Ryan was joined in the booth by two comic actors responsible for the locally popular “Sam ‘n’ Henry” WGN radio show.

Of course, it’s critical to realize that at the birth of radio baseball, no template yet existed of “appropriate” commentary for the game. The idea of broadcasting baseball games over the air was only implemented because enough advertisers showed interest to pay for the program, and in these days before sophisticated Arbitron and Neilsen surveys, it was anyone’s guess as to what the Joe and Jane Doe with a wireless set would enjoy.

To illustrate this in stark black and white, we can look to station WMAQ, which also began broadcasting Cubs and White Sox games around the same time. Their announcer, sportswriter Hal Totten, had a sense of humor drier than any wine, and a voice that barely varied from its signature monotone. These days, a man with Totten’s vocal delivery would be, at best, allowed to read stock quotations over public-access TV.

WGN began regular broadcasts of Cubs and White Sox home games in 1927, with Ryan describing the entire home schedule for both clubs. By this point, Ryan had been moved into an area of the “press coop,” as the press box was often called.

(As was true for most early radio performers, Ryan was not just a sports guy. As “Uncle Quin,” he handled youth programming, reading the Tribune Sunday funnies to kids in the studio and hosting a “Punch & Judy” children’s show. In addition, Ryan anchored political conventions and covered other news events.)

Totten and WMAQ were also on hand for the entire schedule, and other stations eventually joined in the fun, including, at different times, WIND, WBBM, WJJD, and WCFL. At one point in the thirties, five stations aired Cubs and White Sox games. Only later on, in the 1940s, did teams begin to arrange for just one radio station to air the contests, as exclusivity in broadcasting meant a higher rights fee for the club.

But that kind of thinking was years away. Radio was still so new that no concept of “exclusivity,” or even of radio stations paying teams to air games, existed. Since Phil Wrigley wanted local stations to flood the airwaves with Cubs baseball, thus providing free advertising, the struggling White Sox—having fallen far in the wake of the Black Sox scandal—had to allow the broadcasts as well.

GOING FORWARD

At this point, broadcasts usually began only a few minutes before the first pitch. The notion of a call-in show or a long pre-game buildup was years away. For example, immediately before the first pitch in 1927, WGN’s “Lyon & Healy Artist Recital” brought popular and classical music to listeners.

WGN also broadcast other events from Wrigley Field, including Bears football games and prizefights, and other sports including road races and the Kentucky Derby, but baseball was the blue-chip radio sport.

To cater to fans from both sides of town, WGN announcers (and, most likely, those of other stations) read ticker-tape reports of the results of Sox road games between innings of Cubs games at Wrigley Field, and do the same for the Cubs when Ryan was at Comiskey Park airing the White Sox. In addition, announcers also gave score updates from out-of-town games.

What is in all likelihood the first Cubs radio re-creation took place on September 18, 1928, when WGN “broadcast” the Cubs–Braves game from Boston’s Braves Field.

On this day, the White Sox were not playing, but the station wanted to slake the thirst for baseball. Therefore, Irving Vaughan, the Tribune’s Cubs beat writer, sat in the press box in Boston and, on an open telephone line, described every play back to the WGN studios, where Ryan would then describe the action to listeners as if he himself were there.

It wasn’t too long before WGN, and other stations, began recreating afternoon road games as prime-time evening programming, using ticker-tape transmissions of every ball and strike as grist for the re-creating mill. Sound effects, such as crowd noise and the sound of ball on bat, became part of the program, largely to spice things up and make fans feel as though they were actually listening to a live contest.

THE COMMANDER

While Ryan was busy in the studio re-creating Cubs games, the legendary Bob Elson began his big-league career covering White Sox games at Comiskey Park for WGN.

Elson, of Peoria, Illinois, won a contest to become an announcer on KWK in St. Louis in 1928, but WGN jumped in and offered Elson a job as soon as they heard about the contest. The man soon to be known as “The Commander” headed north and soon began to fill in at the park for Ryan, who was already doing too much anyhow, and became popular with fans for his no-nonsense, businesslike delivery.

Sponsors quickly lined up to advertise on ballgames. By 1929, when the Cubs won the NL pennant, the John R. Thompson quick-lunch restaurants and the Baskin/Hart, Schaffner, & Marx stores served as primary sponsors of both the Cubs and White Sox on WGN. John R. Thompson himself even joined Ryan in the WGN Cubs’ booth during 1930 games.

In February 1931, Quin Ryan re-assumed his old duties as WGN’s station manager. Baseball was never his favorite sport anyway, and with Ryan back in the office, Elson was the natural choice to take over full-time diamond broadcasting duties.

At this point, Elson had a 15-minute pre-game show, starting at 2:45 (games at this time in baseball history began at 3:00, and doubleheaders at 12:30 or 1:30), with Thompson’s again a major sponsor.

WGN had stiff competition on the radio dial for baseball during these halcyon days of radio. WBBM’s popular Pat Flanagan brought his signature brogue and clipped delivery to the games; WIBO had Jimmy Corcoran and Bob Hawk on board, and Totten still reigned at WMAQ. Johnny O’Hara did the honors at WCFL, a station owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor.

Announcers often moved between stations at this time, because their voices were tied not to a particular station, but rather to whatever sponsor was associated with the broadcast. Totten, for example, spent time at WCFL and Flanagan ended up at WJJD.

Working in Chicago—especially because of the Cubs, who had won NL flags in 1929, 1932, 1935, and 1938—served as a steppingstone to national success for many young radio men. Jack Brickhouse began his big-league career in 1942 as Elson’s protégé at WGN, while other soon-to-be-famous broadcasters, including Russ Hodges, Jack Drees, Gene Elston, Jimmy Dudley, Milo Hamilton, and Bill Brundige, spent many a summer covering games in Chicago.

One fellow who re-created Cubs games on WHO in Des Moines during the 1930s ended up as a Hollywood actor. Later, after ditching the Democrats for the Republicans, he was elected Governor of California and, finally, President. Ronald Reagan was always a big baseball nut, although back in the 1930s and 1940s, he pronounced his name “Regan.”

WARTIME AND BIG BERT

When Elson went into the Navy during World War II, Bert Wilson took his place on the Cubs airwaves. Wilson remains among the more charismatic announcers the North Siders have ever had.

A genial, gigantic bear of a man, Wilson used to claim that “I don’t care who wins, as long as it’s the Cubs!” He was an eternal optimist, and a frequent butt of jokes from Sox fan/writer Gene Shepherd:

And they had this big fat clown of announcer sayin’ “The Cubs are gonna have a great year, the Cubs are gonna have a great year…”

Wilson, excitable and highly partisan, was so popular that when Elson returned to Chicago after the war, he was reassigned exclusively to the then-moribund White Sox, for whom he announced through 1970 before taking a job in Oakland for one year. (Elson then retired.)

By 1944, the days of multiple stations broadcasting games were gone. Radio was such a high-profit industry that stations wanted exclusivity, and the Cubs were happy to hand over the rights to a single bidder. In 1944, WJJD—in a surprise—came in with the high bid. (WGN regained the rights in 1958 and have held them ever since.)

Bert Wilson worked alone on WJJD through 1949, doing all nine innings of all 154 games, home and road, though even after the war, the radio team was still re-creating some road games and didn’t end that practice until the early fifties. Talk about a heavy schedule!

In 1950, Bud Campbell was hired as Wilson’s sidekick. Meanwhile, the Cubs, following World War II, sank into a 20-year pit of misery. From 1946 through 1966, they finished above .500 only twice. Wilson saw far more losses than wins during his years behind the mike at Wrigley Field.

And the constant travel took a toll on the big man. He had to miss two weeks of action in 1952 due to high blood pressure, and Wilson announced in September 1955 that he would resign from WJJD at the end of the season.

He had planned to take on a lighter schedule for 1956, telecasting 53 Cincinnati Reds games. Wilson, however, had suffered from heart trouble for quite a while, and died on November 5, 1955, in Mesa, Arizona.

The new Cubs voice was Jack Quinlan, who had come on board in 1953 as a third man. Quinlan was friendly and talkative, and worked well with other soon-to-be-famous voices like Gene Elston (with the Cubs from 1954–57) and Milo Hamilton (1956–57).

Generally believed to be one of the rising stars in sports broadcasting during the early 1960s, Quinlan reigned as top dog on Cubs radio during some of the franchise’s worst seasons. During the late 50s and early 60s, optimism and Ernie Banks were the only things Cubs fans had.

WRIGLEY FIELD IN YOUR HOME

The Chicago Cubs, in addition to being among baseball’s radio pioneers, were also at the head of the pack in television. Early in 1946, WBKB-TV announced plans to televise opening day at Wrigley Field. Unfortunately, transmission problems involving their downtown antenna and an inconveniently placed office building forced a delay in game telecasts until July 18.

Jack Gibney handled the commentary on the first game, but he was not destined to be recalled as one of Chicago’s great sports announcers. In 1947, “Whispering” Joe Wilson, joined by Jack Brickhouse, took over in the WBKB booth for all 77 Cubs home contests.

Brickhouse, like his mentor Bob Elson, came from Peoria. But Brick ended up sounding completely unlike “The Commander.” Thin and bespectacled in his younger years, the admittedly “gee-whiz” broadcaster soon bulked up and lost most of his hair.

Elson helped Brickhouse get a job on WGN in the early 1940s, and in 1945, with Elson in the military, “Brick” took over as the #1 on White Sox radio broadcasts.

The next year, however, Elson returned from the service, and Brickhouse, out of a job in Chitown, went to New York in 1946 to announce New York Giants games at the Polo Grounds with neophyte Steve Ellis. Brickhouse did not enjoy working with the flinty Ellis, and returned to Chicago the following season to join Joe Wilson at WBKB.

Early on, Brickhouse cottoned onto television as the next big thing. “I wanted to get into this television thing and find out what it was all about,” he wrote years later. At first, it certainly wasn’t about prosperity; WBKB in 1947 paid Wilson and Brickhouse the princely sum of $35 per game—each.

Around this time, Brickhouse developed his signature call for home runs, a hearty and often voice-cracking “Hey, Hey!!” He also used plenty of other terms, like “Whee!” when the Cubs did something well, or “Oh, brother!” when they didn’t, that Elson, who saw himself as more of a serious journalist, would never have used. Unfortunately for Cubs fans, Brickhouse read more “unhappy totals” at game’s end than “happy totals” in his many years reporting Cubs contests.

WGN, Channel 9 on the dial, decided to enter the televising game in 1948, hiring Brickhouse away from WBKB to become the lead announcer. He was joined by Marty Hogan (for one year) and Harry Creighton (through 1956) in the Channel 9 booth, beginning a 34-year association that helped shape the baseball vocabulary and understanding of millions of Cubs fans.

As in the early days of radio, the baby-step years of TV were not about exclusivity. In 1948, three stations televised all 77 Cubs home contests. Besides WBKB and WGN, WENR also was in on things, employing Bill Brundidge and legendary former Cubs second baseman Rogers Hornsby to describe the action.

WENR dropped out after that one year, leaving WBKB and WGN competing for Cubs fans’ eyeballs until 1951. Following that season, Joe Wilson and WBKB whispered their way into memory.

In those days, television broadcasts of ballgames usually featured two or three cameras at most, one in the upper deck behind home plate and one down each foul line, either at field level or in the upper deck. The innovation of positioning a camera in the center field stands, which most credit to WGN, came in the late 1950s.

Back then, teams saw TV as promotion, much as they had done in the early days of radio. Chicago put their home games on the air in order to bring Wrigley Field into homes and taverns as a way to entice people to come out to the park. The idea of taking a television crew on the road was ridiculous; the cost in the late 1940s of hauling crews and cameras around the country was prohibitive, and independent TV production companies were still years away.

Therefore, Brickhouse spent his summers almost entirely in Chicago, giving words to the pictures of WGN’s Cubs and the White Sox home games. The first-ever Cubs road telecast did not come until 1960.

By then, the throaty, friendly, and enthusiastic Vince Lloyd had slid comfortably into the TV booth, backing up Brickhouse following the departure of Harry Creighton. Lloyd did occasional play-by-play, between-inning commercials, and the popular “Lead-Off Man” pre-game interview for both the Cubs and the White Sox. One of Lloyd’s greatest moments was an irreverent Opening Day 1961 interview at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. with President John F. Kennedy.

Of course, that moment—and most of the other truly memorable Chicago baseball moments of the 1950s and early 1960s—came with Brickhouse and Lloyd calling the action for the White Sox.

May 15, 1960, however, marked a great Cubs moment. In the first game of a doubleheader against the Cardinals at Wrigley Field, Don Cardwell, making his first Cubs start after being acquired from the Phillies, fired a no-hitter. Tape of the eighth and ninth innings (and the post-game) of this contest still exists; WGN’s feed, with Brickhouse and Lloyd at the mikes, is the earliest video of a regular-season no-hitter.

When the Cubs (and Sox) aired their very occasional road games, the WGN-TV crew split, adding another staff announcer such as Lloyd Pettit or Len Johnson to help deal with the extra work. Only in 1968, after the Pale Hose departed WGN for the greener ($$$) pastures of the UHF dial, did the Cubs ramp up their schedule, increasing road games from a paltry five in 1967 to a hearty 63.

GRIEF AND GROWTH

Following the end of his successful playing career, Lou Boudreau went on to not very successful stints managing the Boston Red Sox and Kansas City Athletics. After the sad A’s canned him, Boudreau signed on December 12, 1957 with WGN radio, where he joined Jack Quinlan in the booth, replacing Milo Hamilton and Gene Elston.

This was a new beginning for the Cubs in many ways. WGN had regained the team’s radio rights after the ’57 campaign, signing a five-year deal, and were glad to bring the then-30-year-old Quinlan over from WIND. Boudreau’s selection as color man was a surprise—he was the first former player in the radio booth since megaphone-voiced Lou Fonseca in the 1940s—but he went on to a long career with WGN and became as beloved in Chicago as he had been in Cleveland.

Never a natural announcer, Boudreau was rarely asked to do play-by-play, instead using his experience and storehouse of knowledge to add color and analysis to Quinlan’s mellifluous broadcast.

This being the Cubs, however, nothing was that easy. When aging Charley Grimm proved unsuitable as manager of the team just 17 games into the 1960 campaign, Cubs “management” (sic) arranged to trade announcer for skipper, moving Grimm to the booth to team with Quinlan, then sending Boudreau to the field as manager!

So Boudreau served out the remainder of 1960 as manager, doing no better in that role than he had with the A’s or Red Sox. For 1961, the Cubs began their ridiculous five-year “College of Coaches” experiment; future Hall of Famer Boudreau retook his place at the microphone and the banjo-playing Grimm toddled off to retirement.

Quinlan and Boudreau teamed together through 1964. During this time, Quinlan assumed the mantle as WGN radio’s top sports voice, covering Big Ten football as well as the Chicago Bears, who won the 1963 NFL title. He also handled, with Chuck Thompson, national radio coverage of the 1960 World Series. (Boudreau, a three-sport star in high school, later covered NBA basketball and NHL hockey for WGN. The station kept its employees mighty busy back then.)

But tragedy broke up the Quinlan-Boudreau “dream team,” still felt by many to be among the best ever to cover games in Chicago. On March 19, 1965, returning from a spring-training golf date, Quinlan’s car skidded on highway outside of Phoenix. When he rammed a parked truck, the 37-year-old Quinlan was killed instantly, leaving a wife and four children.

Less than a week later, WGN promoted Vince Lloyd to the #1 radio job. He would remain radio partner with Boudreau through 1981, entertaining and educating millions of fans. Lloyd Pettit became Brickhouse’s full-time television partner, a post he would hold through 1970.

Vince Lloyd Skaff, born in 1917, dropped his last name when he began his broadcasting career in 1940. He worked his way through Peoria—like Elson, Brickhouse, and Quinlan—and joined WGN’s television and radio sports staff in 1949. He worked his way up slowly, and was ready for the opportunity to be a #1 sports voice. The excitable Lloyd had a signature call for a great Cubs play: “Holy Mackerel!”

In his first regular season Cubs game as #1 radio announcer, he and Boudreau described a barely believable 10-10 Cubs/Cardinals tie at Wrigley Field that was halted after nine innings by darkness.

After a poor 1965 season, and a last-place finish in 1966, Lloyd, Boudreau, Brickhouse, and Pettit suddenly found themselves, in 1967, broadcasting a surprising Cubs team that vaulted into third place under the management of Leo Durocher.

With a core of Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, and Ron Santo joined by recent acquisitions Randy Hundley, Fergie Jenkins, Bill Hands, and farm products Ken Holtzman, Glenn Beckert, and Don Kessinger, the Cubs remained competitive through the early 1970s—though they never won.

Through those exciting years, Lloyd, Boudreau, Brickhouse, and Pettit (replaced by Jim West in 1971) ascended to new heights as Chicago’s voices of summer, especially after the White Sox went into the tank in 1968. Even when the Pale Hose became competitive again for a few seasons in the 1970s—announcer Harry Caray helping to pull the Sox from the mire—the Cubs had regained their place, on WGN radio and TV, at the top of the city’s sporting scene.

CARAY ON WAYWARD SON

But nothing lasts. Brickhouse, who had been in the business for nearly 50 years, announced late in the strike-addled 1981 campaign that he would retire at season’s end.

Milo Hamilton, a well-traveled veteran who WGN hired in 1980, was scheduled to take over as the team’s TV voice in 1982. But the Tribune Company, which had purchased the Cubs in 1981 from the Wrigley estate, had other ideas.

Harry Caray, for a decade the biggest star the White Sox had, departed the club during the winter of 1981–82 in a disagreement over owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s decision to put a majority of the team’s games on his new cable television setup, SportsVision. Caray didn’t want to lose the exposure of free TV, feeling he was established enough not to have to “start over” with a new venture.

Caray, known as the “Mayor of Rush Street” in honor of his well-known penchant for cocktails in Chicago’s best-known nightlife neighborhood, took the initiative. He called the Tribune, then met with company officials in a whirlwind courtship, and signed a deal with the Cubs in early 1982.

Hamilton was stunned. The top job had been promised to him, and here he was, deposed by man he personally disliked. But Hamilton stayed on board in Chicago, and the team threw him a bone—in 1983, he dislodged Lloyd from the radio play-by-play role for six innings, then went to television for the middle three when Caray took over on radio.

This meant that the venerable Lloyd, a full-time play-by-play man since 1965, was now relegated uncomfortably to color work, and Boudreau’s continuing presence made for a confusing three-man radio booth.

Caray, a calculated, intelligent professional, never looked back; he knew he could call the shots, and took over the North Side has he had the South a decade earlier. His beery “Holy Cow!” calls, enthusiastic “Voice of the Fan” persona, and unquestioned knowledge of baseball quickly made him perhaps the most popular Cubs broadcaster ever.

For 1983, Caray teamed for the first time with Steve Stone, a former Cy Young Award winner with Baltimore who had also pitched for both the White Sox and Cubs in the 1970s. Witty, smart, and blessed with a fine broadcasting voice, Stone—despite a relative lack of experience behind the mike—proved immediately, and enormously, popular partnering with Caray (and Hamilton) on WGN-TV.

With WGN added to most basic cable systems during the 1980s, Caray and the Cubs became America’s sweethearts. It was quite an irony given Caray’s initial lack of interest in cable television.

The Cubs’ 1984 NL East title further cemented the franchise as a national cause célèbre. Following that season, Hamilton departed for Houston, while Astros #2 man Dewayne Staats made his way to Chicago.

A WORD IN SPANISH

The Cubs began Spanish-language broadcasts in 1981 on WOJO radio. Play-by-play man Leon Martinez held that role through 1994 (except for 1993) on various stations with various amounts of games being broadcast. Since the end of the 1995 season, however, the Cubs have not had a single broadcast in Spanish, although the White Sox continue to carry games en Español.

With 18 of 30 Major League clubs features some form of Spanish broadcasting in 2006, the Cubs’ lack of a similar radio deal—considering that Chicago has one of the largest Spanish-language populations in the country—is, frankly, embarrassing.

CHANGE OF THE GUARD

Through the thirties through the eighties, Cubs viewers and listeners had been well served by unpolished, raw, but thrilling broadcasters like Lloyd, Boudreau, Pat Flanagan, Wilson, Brickhouse, Pettit, and Caray.

But the ingress of “professional types,” which began with Hamilton in 1982 and has continued through the intervening years, has changed the quality of Chicago baseball broadcasts. Some of these “pro” types have lent a high quality to the game, but a far greater number have simply been car wrecks.

Truly, Caray, Brickhouse, and Lloyd were from a different age: unfashionable, stewards of their own special language, and occasionally ridiculous in their homerism, but Chicago fans loved them that way. Stone proved a perfect foil to Caray’s nearly out-of-control style without falling into the pattern too often favored by glossy, tiresome “professional voices.”

Lloyd faded out of the picture, taking over in 1985 as developer of the Cubs’ radio network. Boudreau hung around through 1987. But they weren’t easy to replace; experiments with two color men, bumbling former Manager and GM Jim Frey in 1987 and the frankly horrific Davey Nelson in 1988–89, ended ignominiously. (Nelson does deserve mention, if for no other reason, as the team’s first ever African American broadcaster.)

In 1990, to help augment the aging Caray (who had missed several weeks in 1986 due to a stroke), the Cubs hired Thom Brennaman, son of Cincinnati broadcaster Marty Brennaman, as the #1 radio guy. The Tribune Company believed that Brennaman was on his way to a great career, and brought him in even though he had just two years of part-time TV coverage to his credit.

While Brennaman the Younger indeed has gone on to greater heights, in Arizona and with FOX on national television, he certainly ranks far from the top on the Cubs broadcaster list; in Chicago, his boisterous voice and forced enthusiasm belied a serious lack of insight.

In addition, former players Bob Brenly and Ron Santo—neither of whom had any broadcasting experience—came aboard in 1990 as color men. While Brenly lasted just one year before going back on the field, Santo carved himself out a new career as one of city’s most beloved radio personalities.

Santo, more than any other among his generation of Wrigley Field baseball heroes, bleeds Cubbie blue. Back in the 60s and 70s, Ernie Banks was “Mr. Cub.” But with Banks’ exile from the organization in the early 1980s, Santo has taken over in the last fifteen years or so as the new face of Cubbies past. A hero to many through his work for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (he has lost both his legs to the disease), Santo is unpolished, frank, emotional, and completely entertaining. He is more loved now as a broadcaster even than he was as a player.

Santo didn’t really come alive in the booth, however, until former Minnesota Twins and Milwaukee Brewers second-banana Pat Hughes came aboard as the Cubs’ radio voice in 1996.

Hughes, heretofore Bob Uecker’s straight man in the County Stadium booth, immediately took to the #1 job in Chicago. Showing an excellent sense of humor of his own, along with a smooth delivery and a terrific knowledge of the game, Hughes in his 11 years in Chicago has gotten more out of Santo than anyone else. His booming voice ranks among the true pleasures of being a Cubs fan.

Santo is not really capable of play-by-play duty, as fans learned during some terrifying trial runs in the mid-1990s. Therefore, Hughes was forced for years to man the mike for all nine innings of 162 games a year before WGN brought a third man, Andy Masur, into the booth, starting in 2003, to handle a paltry half-inning of action. Masur shows promise, though it’s difficult to grow into a job doing four minutes of play by play per game.

CABLE CUB

In 1993, the Cubs finally joined the cable TV revolution—but in a measured, conservative, Tribunesque way. Because of local TV blackouts necessitated by MLB’s new ESPN contract, the Cubs needed a new outlet for Wednesday night games. Therefore, the Tribune elected to transfer the contests to their CLTV outlet, a 24-hour local news channel. CLTV continued to show Cubs games through 1998, when Fox Sports set up a channel in Chicago.

By that time, however, the Cubs had lost Harry.

After young Josh Lewin, formerly with Baltimore, spent 1997 helping out as a play-by-play man in the Cubs booth, he was forced out; it is believed that Harry pushed Lewin off the job to make way for his own grandson Chip, at that time announcing with the Seattle Mariners.

But despite Chip being hired for 1998, the family arrangement never came to pass. After broadcasting Cubs games for 15 seasons, Harry Caray passed away on February 18, 1998. His age was given as 84.

Caray’s death, which received in Chicago the attention that one would have expected for a head of state, marked another decline in the television booth. Chip Caray, excitable and pleasant but not particularly distinctive or knowledgeable, never really won the fans over in Chicago (which might have been an inevitable fate for anyone succeeding Harry).

Fill-in play-by-play man Wayne Larrivee, a football and basketball announcer who worked Cubs games on weekends, was barely competent at baseball and unpleasant listening to boot.

As a tribute to Caray, his signature singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” continued between the top and bottom of the seventh. But instead of using a tape of Harry, or simply letting the fans sing the song, the Cubs’ marketing director, John McDonough, chose instead to turn it into an opportunity to associate the team with b- and c-level celebrities.

The noxious “Celebrity seventh-inning stretch,” which has continued since early 1998, tends to feature an uncomfortably high amount of actors and actresses associated with: 1) WGN television programs, 2) WGN radio programs, and 3) various non-baseball sports.

Meanwhile, in 2000, Stone, came down with a nearly fatal case of a heart disease called valley fever and missed most of the season, with former players Randy Hundley, Bob Dernier, and Dave Otto filling in uncomfortably.

In 2001, with Stone retiring to regain his health, Otto took over on cable telecasts, while Joe Carter began a disastrous two-year stretch for contests aired on WGN and WCIU, a local UHF channel that took over some broadcasts as WGN continued to divest itself of Cubs baseball.

WGN became a member of the nationwide WB television network in the late 1990s, and taking on the fledgling organization’s schedule of prime-time programming meant that Cubs games had to be shifted elsewhere. Most of the contests went over to cable, with a handful to low-rated WCIU.

To make things worse, after winning the Wild-Card playoff berth in 1998, the team went back into the toilet for a few years. But the team and the telecasts improved in 2003; Stone returned, casting Carter and Otto into the wilderness, and the Cubs came within five outs of going to the World Series before losing the NLCS to the surprising Florida Marlins.

AND NOW…

Under new manager Dusty Baker, the Cubs were supposed to make 2003 a new beginning. But it was only a solitary glimmer in the darkness. The team fell apart in the last week of the 2004 season, players began sniping—unbelievably—at Caray and Stone in the television booth.

The whole brouhaha started when a few Cubs began criticizing the announcers for being too quick to credit players on other teams with good performances. It was, of course, a ridiculous canard; objectivity used to be regarded as a good thing in a broadcaster. The Cubs should have looked in their mirrors instead.

Following the finish of the campaign, both announcers were history, as the organization caved in to pressure from whiny part-time players and a too-sensitive manager. The parting with Chip Caray is said to be irreparable.

It is also possible that Comcast Sports Net was part of the decision; the network outbid Fox for the rights to carry Cubs cable telecasts in 2005, and might have wanted to save money by jettisoning the two incumbents.

Comcast and the Cubs hired another former Milwaukee Brewers mikeman, Len Kasper, to take over on TV for 2005. Bob Brenly, Cubs radio color man in 1990 and more recently a World Series winning-manager with Arizona in 2001, joined Kasper for all telecasts. After a bumpy first year, in which Brenly received criticism for treating a struggling team with kid gloves, the duo improved in 2006—just as the team fell into the cellar for the first time since 2000.

The future on the air for the Cubs is suspect. Santo can’t go on forever, and at press time it is unclear whether the TV team will be a long-term proposition. In the past two years, several long-term radio rightsholders, such as KDKA for the Pirates, KMOX for the Cardinals, and WCCO for the Twins, have lost the bidding to keep their teams; the availability of broadcasts on the Internet has made paying rights fees prohibitively expensive for some stations.

WGN and the Cubs have been tied together since the 1920s, growing up together through the radio age and the TV age. The growth of cable and the Internet have put strains on the relationship, but it is almost impossible to think of the Cubs without also thinking of WGN.