Wireless Wonder

How did baseball get started on the radio? Pull up a chair.

“I watch a lot of baseball on the radio.”

- President Gerald Ford

Harold Arlin was an electrical engineer by trade. He worked as a foreman with Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh and while there’s no evidence he set out to be a pioneer, that is exactly what he became. Arlin may not often be mentioned in the same sentence as Vin Scully, Red Barber, Ernie Harwell and other legendary baseball broadcasters, but in his own way, he helped make their careers possible.

On this day 104 years ago , the 25-year-old Arlin was the man at the mike for the first radio broadcast of a major league game. His call came from the box seats at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, on KDKA, the first commercial radio station in the country. It was a Friday afternoon. Arlin bought a ticket and set up a scorecard on a wooden plank alongside him, near the telephone he’d converted into a microphone and a jerry-rigged transmitter. Among those in attendance was National League president John Heydler, who was returning to New York following the Black Sox trial in Chicago. The first-place Pirates, a club with future Hall of Famers Max Carey and Rabbit Maranville, beat the last-place Phillies, 8-5. It wouldn’t happen immediately, but the marvel of sound being delivered through a technology known as wireless would transform American culture and play a massive role in the burgeoning popularity of baseball, a sport played every day, at a pace that invited storytelling and scene-setting.

Not even a year before his historic broadcast from Forbes Field, Arlin and a group of fellow engineers were curious about a makeshift shack that sat atop the roof of a Westinghouse plant. The shack was the new headquarters for KDKA. The engineers were invited to inspect it and see the microphone up close. “It looked like a tomato can with a felt lining. We called it a mushophone,” Arlin said, according to Curt Smith’s classic book, Memories from the Microphone: A Century of Baseball Broadcasting.