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.

 

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