They pulled me in: I didn't watch the World Series, but by the fourth game, I was keeping track of how it was going. Some of the greatest baseball players of all time were battling it out, and despite an early adulthood spent listening to Cincinnati Reds games with an ear only for upcoming commercial breaks,* even I can tell we will not see their like again soon.
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* "Running board" for a sporting event can be a great time to work on small engineering projects, but you have to spare half an ear for the game. Baseball is especially good; basketball and football can slam to a sudden halt without much warning and you'd better not stray too far from the controls, but the end of an inning is telegraphed in advance. Most play-by-play and "color"/stats teams sum up significant moments before the ads begin, leaving the board op plenty of time to stroll down the hall, push a button, flip a few switches, log the break and put the game back on. And if you missed it? In my 20s, alone in a big studio building, it was very convenient that the network amplifiers were in a rack just outside of the Engineering Shop/transmitter room, along the hallway back to the control room. The CBS and Reds amplifiers had great big knobs on them and if you had noticed the commercial cue at the last minute, you could knock the volume down to zero on your way past (so you didn't get network "filler" on the air), race down to the control room, hit the Start button for the commercial, turn off the network audio on the audio mixer, then walk back up the hall and return the amplifier volume setting to normal. Those big knobs -- and the heavy-duty attenuators they controlled -- weren't stock; one of my predecessors had set it all up for exactly that situation.
So if you're listening to the big game, and a local commercial starts a little late? --I don't know; these days, the people doing the radio play-by-play can start their own commercial breaks, and like as not, there's no one minding the store back at the station.
Update
10 months ago
2 comments:
I listened to three NFL games and a couple of WS games on our local iHeart sports AM station while replacing subfloor (yeah...yuck!) in our spare bedroom over the last week. I heard not a single local commercial...the local breaks were solid blocks of PSA's. Either the sales staff isn't trying, or iHeart no longer has a local sales staff, which would not surprise me these days.
Same station is supposed to be a Viking Audio Network (apparently "radio" in your name is toxic) affiliate, but today, they were airing the national Westwood One feed of the game instead of the team's network. That's a bit weird, also.
I never played the recorded ID when I was running the board on games...always a live-read with time and temp...that's just how I am. :)
The radio station I worked at during High School didn't broadcast professional sports, other than the one Sunday each year for the Indy 500 (I worked the Sunday Morning sign-on shift).
Local HS football and baseball games only, and most of those the announcers had the scripts for ad copy and we were just mainly responsible for pulling stuff off the teletypes to build the evening news cast and made sure the transmitter was still working. And making the :00 and :30 station IDs if they forgot.
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