WHY did the Dodgers switch to a right-wing radio station??

[Oeditpus Rex]

I'm doomed to at least one season of promos for O'Reilly and Hannity as well as ads for the Reagan Library — which, by the way, apparently has a mock-up of Air Force One, which Reagan flew to Berlin to tell Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," thus ending communism single-handedly.



:banghead:

[wain]

1. Because they are not the real Dodgers...

sorry, I'm still stuck. It's so hard to forget.

[Oeditpus Rex]

4. After 50 years?

Dude — Walter O'Malley died in 1979. :crazy:

[reyd reid reed]

2. You know as well as I do...

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[Oeditpus Rex]

5. I don't think it's quite that simple

I don't know what happened with the Dodgers and KFWB (which is also right-wing but never ran hate promos during games), but it's almost always the stations that don't renew broadcast contracts because carrying baseball just isn't profitable in most markets.


Play-by-play radio consultant Bob Snyder has one word to describe the current radio rights environment: horrible.

"For every profitable radio rights play-by-play deal, there are probably 10 that are not," said Snyder, who owns Beason Broadcast Partners outside Chicago. Across all sports leagues, the soaring rights fees paid to teams over the last decade have caught up to the radio stations, and many are now drawing the line. The stations' financial losses "used to be a justifiable expense," he said. Now, he said the losses have gotten so large that "it's no longer justifiable."

http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/articles/2006/04/13/red_sox_radio_deal_likely_to_top_12m/


So, if it's such a crappy deal, why would KABC — which is owned by Citadel, a public corporation — sign with the Dodgers when they could make more money by filling that time with O'Hannity and other fascists?

One thing, though: Maybe they have a lot of sponsors who didn't buy time for spring, and the hate ads will be fewer when the regular season starts.

[Redstone]

3. Oh, damn, that's a shame. Baseball On The Radio should be sacrosanct.

And I'm not being sarcastic here. You should NOT have to suffer through anything worse than the (to be expected) loud ads for local car dealers when you're listening to The Game.

And I'm not even that much of a baseball fan. But there are SOME things that are (or should be) sacred in this country. Baseball On The Radio is one of them.

Redstone

[Oeditpus Rex]

6. I like how you cap that

"Baseball on the Radio" has been a meme for a couple of seasons now, but I thought it was just a Giants thing; I've heard it only on their broadcasts, anyway (which I can still get on the regular old radio I've had for about 30 years instead of the satellite thing I had to get to hear the Dodgers).

Funny thing is, they say it kinda like they're trying to get people to grasp some novel idea — to pry them away from $100-per-month sports cable packages, I guess — but in reality, baseball and radio are indeed a sacred marriage, and I've felt that for as long as I've been a fan.