- Harold Arlin
On August 5, 1921, 25-year-old Harold Arlin held a telephone to his ear. Into the mouthpiece, he relayed the outcome of each pitch of a game between the Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates. The phone was rigged so that Arlin’s voice would reach not just one intended audience member on the other side of the line, but some thousands of listeners tuned to KDKA, the nation’s first commercial radio station, in Pittsburgh. This was the sport’s first broadcast, and Arlin was its first baseball play-by-play announcer.
“We didn’t know whether we’d talk into a total vacuum or whether somebody would hear us,” Arlin later wrote in his book, Play-by-Play: Radio, Television, and Big-Time College Sport.