Will A's Radio Silence Be the Start of Another Impressive MLB Career?

So now it comes out that the A’s will go without a local radio station for the 2020 season.

Everything old is new again; this happened in 1978 when then-owner Charlie Finley was trying to sell the team. With no for-profit radio signed on, the University of California’s radio station, KALX, stepped up for the first month of the season before KNEW, a medium-sized for-profit Bay Area station finally signed on.

Four decades later, there are apparently no white knights like KALX ready to step up. Fans will be able to follow the games via the TuneIn app, but that’s scant solace to fans driving around in cars for whom TuneIn isn’t much of an option.

Is there anything that speaks more to summer in America than having the game on the radio while you’re driving around? Maybe. Maybe not.

For one Major League executive, that one month of on-air experience at KALX was transformative. Larry Baer, then a junior at UC-Berkeley, handled the play-by-play after negotiating with Finley to have KALX step in.

It only lasted 16 home games for Baer and KALX, but after graduating with a degree in political science in 1980, Baer joined the Giants as marketing director. He went on to Harvard Business School and worked for Westinghouse Broadcasting before serving as an important aide to Peter Magowan when the supermarket magnate put together a group that moved to buy the Giants when a move to Tampa seemed likely.

Baer has spent the rest of his career with the Giants, where he eventually became CEO before being served with a 2019 suspension; he’s since been reinstated.

Is there a Larry Baer-ish story likely to come from this radio stoppage for the A’s? Probably not.

But it would be good if there was some kind of feel-better story to turn this falloff by the A’s.

Oakland president Dave Kaval spun the Tuesday, Feb. 18, announcement in the best possible terms, which is his job. But Kaval saying the A’s are just building off the success of their top-ranked team podcast, A’s Cast, is a tough sell.

It’s made a little easier by the fact that last year’s station, Oakland’s KTRB-860, is a home for conservative political swill that didn’t go down well with much of the A’s audience.

Still it would be nice to see a radio station in the Bay Area (KHTK-AM 1140 in Sacramento is the biggest of a dozen Northern California radio stations that will still be broadcasting games) available to fans rather than facing the prospect of having to fumble with an app on a cell phone while in the car, if for no other reason that phones and driving don’t mix particularly well.

The plan with TuneIn is that the A’s will put spring training as well as regular season games on the app with Ken Korach back for his 25th season and Vince Cotroneo returning for his 15th. Ray Fosse will swing between radio and TV.

In addition, the A’s will handle regular season home games broadcasts in Spanish on TuneIn, and two Bay Area Spanish stations, KIQI-1010 AM and KATD-990 AM will air the broadcasts on home Fridays. Saturday and Sundays with longtime A’s voices Amaury Pi-Gonzalez and Manolo Hernandez-Douen serving as on-air voices.