Before Graham McNamee, there was basic reporting of the game by broadcasters, and long dead silences between plays. But the opera singer turned broadcaster changed the way people listening to their radio interacted with the game, and he paved the way for the type of broadcasting we know and love today. Tune in to listen to this story and more.

Radio was floundering in its early days. People didn’t know what to make of it. Baseball owners were afraid of it, and for the first years of radio broadcasting, there was no banter, only dead air between plays. In the midst of this lull came an athlete and personality who bewitched a nation, and was single-handedly responsible for the spread of millions of radios across the country. But the reasons for the “Babe Ruth addiction” are not as obvious as they may seem.

In this first episode of Season 4, I discuss a lie I’ve been telling myself for 40 years about who my favorite team actually was, and I begin the amazing journey of baseball broadcasting. Before there was television, there was radio, and before that, there was the telegraph and the amazing broadcasting innovations that came from this limited technology, like scoreboard baseball, and ballgames performed, live, in opera houses. But the first radio broadcasts were missing one crucial ingredient.