Center Field Shot 

                                                      The Cubs Embrace Broadcasting

            While the goal of Cardinal broadcasting was the geographic expansion of the team's fan base, the goal of the Chicago Cubs under long time owners William Wrigley and his son Philip K. Wrigley was expansion over the airwaves.  The Wrigleys knew the value of radio in marketing chewing gum and saw the medium's potential for major league baseball.  By the mid-1920s, when most owners thought that radio broadcasts of major league games decreased ballpark attendance, William Wrigley opened his park to virtually any station interested in covering the games.  Wrigley, like Larry MacPhail of the Reds and Brooklyn Dodgers, believed that radio broadcasts did not give away the product, but increased and diversified interest in the product.  Indeed, Wrigley did not see the value of radio in the small rights fees he would receive from exclusive licensing of the Cubs broadcasts to one station.  Rather, radio's contribution came from promoting the largely winning Cubs teams of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the wonders of "the friendly confines of Wrigley Field."   For Wrigley, the more stations carrying the Cubs meant more potential listeners and more potential Cub fans. 

          Long time Giants broadcaster Russ Hodges, who got his start in Chicago, described the many announcers covering Chicago teams:

Chicago was wide open in all other respects, so it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that there were almost no radio restrictions there either.  But I must admit it was something of a shock to find the press boxes at Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field crawling with play-by-play announcers.  There was nothing exclusive about my new job.  I was one of five different guys sitting behind five different microphones broadcasting over five different stations.  We worked side by side, so close together that we never had to worry about dead air.  No matter which station they tuned, the fans could always hear somebody talking.

Daytime major league baseball also provided stations with inexpensive, commercially sponsored programming.  The dominant commercial fare of daytime radio was soap operas targeted to women and late afternoon adventure programs aimed at children.  Stations that could not offer these successful commercial genres frequently saw daytime as "sustaining time" (i.e., not advertiser supported) to be filled with less popular programming that maintained the station's signal until sponsored programming could be obtained.  Cubs' baseball provided broadcasters, not blessed with successful soaps or children's fare, programming that could produce commercial revenue by attracting male listeners, both young and old, and women who enjoyed the national pastime more than soaps.

            With the advent of television, P. K. Wrigley followed his father's radio plan.  As early as 1945, Wrigley commissioned Chicago television pioneer Captain William Eddy to develop techniques for covering baseball.   Eddy produced a manual for the production of baseball telecasts that greatly influenced the early coverage of the game.  During this mid-1940s experimental period, Wrigley also gave the Cubs’ television rights to Eddy.   WGN-TV’s initial purchase of television equipment included facilities for remote production, including a large van called the “Blue Goose.”   This mobile unit was a self-contained television control room that could microwave live transmissions from anywhere in the Chicago area.  Thus, at its sign-on on April 5, 1948, the station was fully prepared for live baseball coverage.