This time technology has gone too far.
It's time to draw a line in the sand.
Some things are sacred.
Baseball, for instance.
Look, I can deal with the sea of emails I have to wade through every day. I'm a social media whore, it kind of goes with the job. I spend an inordinate amount of time posting on Twitter and Facebook every day.
I've come to the realization that technology has changed the media forever. There is no going back. But there has to be some limits.
And the Oakland A's just crossed it.
The Major League Baseball club announced this week that it will stream its games this year exclusively on the TuneIn app.
In other words, the A's games will not air on Bay Area radio.
I was shook up when they moved games off the AM band to FM. I missed the static and scratchy sound that accompanied the game. The FM sound was just too smooth for my taste.
But it was still radio.
There are lots of things that are close to my heart. There is my wife and kids. This God-forsaken newspaper. Hell, I just became a grandfather.
But baseball on the radio is sacred.
It's a habit I picked up from my father. He was the first man I encountered who preferred listening to the game on the radio as opposed to the scratchy images that showed up on our snowy black-and-white TV.
I would gaze out the kitchen window and see dad sitting at the picnic table in the back yard. Actually, I couldn't see him at all in the dark. But I could distinctly make out the orange tip of his burning cigarette. When I saw dad sitting at that table, listening to his beloved Phils on an old transistor radio he conveniently stashed in his shirt pocket, with a cold Schmidt's by his side, I knew all was right with the world.
When I would inquire why he preferred the radio over the TV, he uttered one of the most prescient sentences I've ever encountered about the beauty of baseball.
"I can see the game better on the radio," he said.
I've been a radio fan ever since.
By Saam. Bill Campbell. Andy Musser. Richie Ashburn. Harry Kalas. Scott Franzke. Larry Anderson.
They are the voices of summer.
There is nothing better than sitting on the back deck on a steaming summer night, enveloped by the stars above and buffeted by the chorus of the crickets and cicadas, while listening to the Phillies on the radio.
To me, it's the magic of summer.
It is something I look forward to all winter.
It is a bond I forged with my father.
Baseball is reeling these days, shaken to its core by news that the Houston Astros, on their way to the 2017 World Series Championship, engaged in an elaborate, technology-aided system of cheating, stealing signs from the opposing teams and relaying that information to their batters.
The game is hurting. Fans'confidence is shaken, but the game will rebound. It always has.
But no games on the radio? That could be the beginning of the end.
Shame on the A's, who trace their roots to Philadelphia, for abandoning one of the rites of summer.
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