Baseball’s 1st Radio Broadcast

100 years ago today the Phillies were part of baseball history, the first radio broadcast. It took place in Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field where the Phillies were playing the Pirates.

KDKA, America’s first licensed radio station, aired the Friday afternoon, August 5, 1921, game. Harold Arlin, the station’s first announcer, broadcast the game by himself. “There was a lot to describe,” he is quoted in a new book, Memories From The Microphone, by Curt Smith.*

More from that book: “Our guys at KDKA didn’t think that baseball would last on radio. I did it as sort of a one-off project,” Arlin said, recalling “no one told me I had to talk between pitches.”

According to another book, Voices Of The Game, “Arlin used a converted telephone as a microphone as he called the action from a box seat at ground level.”

Three runs in the bottom of the eighth gave the Pirates an 8–5 win. Plenty to describe.

As a side note, Harold’s grandson, RHP Steve Arlin, was the Phillies selection in the secondary phase of the 1966 June amateur draft.