New Yorkers listen to special radio broadcast of 1922 World Series.

Major League Baseball team owners, supposedly great champions of the free market, have often been baffled by basic economics, working against their own interests. They enjoy an anti-trust exemption to stifle competition and receive tons of corporate welfare whenever they decide its time for a new ballpark, yet they vehemently opposed free agency, which made the game a 365-day-a-year sport, putting real fire in the Hot Stove League. They even engaged in collusion to artificially suppress player movement and salaries. That very movement they despised helped turn the owners from millionaires into billionaires, something which still seems lost on some in this exclusive club. 

So, it’s no surprise that they strongly considered banning radio broadcasts of games a century ago, fearing it would kill gate receipts. Thankfully William Wrigley intervened, realizing the promotional value. Today broadcast rights, even local ones, are worth billions, making them the most valuable aspect of team ownership.

From James Walker at the Conversation:

In the 1920s, teams that did broadcast games on the radio usually charged nothing for the rights, settling for free promotion of their on-field product. For Wrigley, who was accustomed to paying retail rates to advertise his chewing gum, the prospect of two hours of free advertising for his Chicago Cubs (over as many as five Chicago radio stations) was generous enough compensation. But the anti-radio owners, led by the three New York clubs (the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers), wanted to deny Wrigley his two-hour Cubs commercial.

Although he jealously guarded his control over World Series radio rights, MLB Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis believed local radio rights were a league matter and left the decision to broadcast regular season games to the owners. At several NL and AL owners meetings in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the anti-radio forces proposed a league-wide ban on local broadcasts of regular season games.

Pro-radio clubs, led by Cubs’ President Bill Veeck, Sr, were adamant that the choice to broadcast belonged to his club. It was no more of concern to other clubs, he argued, than the decision whether or not to sell peanuts to the fans in the stands.

But to teams like the St Louis Cardinals, it was a concern: because the Cubs’ radio waves reached the Cardinals’ fan base, they were convinced that the broadcasts negatively influenced their own attendance numbers. The decision of whether or not to broadcast games, they reasoned, was not the Cubs alone to make.•