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.

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