The First Radio Broadcast of a Major League Baseball Game

On August 5, 1921, radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast a major league baseball game for the first time, as announcer Harold Arlin called the Pittsburgh Pirates' 8-5 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies at Forbes Field. The broadcast changed how Americans consumed baseball and launched the era of sports broadcasting.

Arlin was a 25-year-old electrical engineer at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, which owned KDKA, the first commercial radio station in the United States. He sat in a box seat behind home plate and spoke into a converted telephone that technicians had rigged into a crude microphone. The device, nicknamed the "mushiphone" for its shape, looked like a tomato can wrapped in felt lining.

His audience was small. Only a handful of shortwave radio enthusiasts in the Pittsburgh area could receive the signal, and most of them were Westinghouse employees with early radio sets. There was no broadcast booth, no production team, and no precedent for how to describe a baseball game on air. Arlin improvised, narrating plays as they unfolded and filling dead time between pitches.

KDKA had broadcast Warren Harding's presidential election results just nine months earlier, in November 1920, and Westinghouse saw sports as a way to build public interest in radio technology. Within days of the Pirates broadcast, Arlin also called the first radio broadcast of a tennis match. By October, he broadcast the first football game on radio.

The impact spread quickly. By the mid-1920s, multiple stations carried baseball games, and teams discovered that radio drove attendance rather than cannibalizing it. Within a decade, voices like Graham McNamee and later Red Barber became as familiar to fans as the players themselves. Every broadcast since, from Vin Scully's sixty-seven years to today's streaming feeds, traces its lineage to Arlin's improvised call from behind home plate on a summer afternoon in Pittsburgh.