6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

Tom Hoffarth at the Daily News brings us a long-expected report that KLAA is changing its stripes, away from talk and politics to sports radio:

Since it will be the new home for the Angels' English-language broadcasts after a five-year run with KSPN (710AM), the Anaheim-based station has been glacially moving away from a conservative political talk format (with syndicated shows hosted by Glenn Beck, Michael Reagan and Michael Savage). The Angels' recent spring training games were eventually carried live in the middle of March, replacing infomercials that the station had normally aired in the afternoons.

The one potential issue with the station as it competes with KSPN and KLAC for sports-talk listeners could be with its signal coming out of Orange County, which powers down from 50,000 watts during the day to 20,000 at night. An Angels spokesman said the team continues to look for affiliates, throughout the region and beyond.

To accomodate the new sports-talk shows, as well as the pre- and post-game shows hosted by Steve Physioc, the Angels recently finished building a state-of-the-art broadcasting facility inside Angels Stadium for all of their original programming.

The station operates without a traditional general manager or program director. Angels team president Dennis Kuhl has been in charge of hiring and forming sports-talk related programming. John Carpino, the Angels' senior VP of sales and marketing, is also the general sales manager at 830-AM.

Also in that same piece, a bit of nostalgia for the Dodgers in the Coliseum, including an interesting play that Vin Scully himself helped to resolve:

It means that when Vin Scully calls the game for KCAL (Channel 9), he will be high above right field in the football press box (with Charley Steiner and Rick Monday doing the game on radio for KABC (790 AM) instead of that cozy perch hanging underneath Section 12.

"It was a wooden structure, fastened to the roof of the tunnel, with an iron staircase going up to it, and it was very close to home plate," Scully recalled. "The strange thing was that even though the Coliseum was so big and formidable, those press seats made everything feel so intimate and close."

So close, that it reminded Scully of a game when a controversial play allowed him, of all people, to help resolve it.

"The Dodgers were playing the Milwaukee Braves, and there was a play where the batter topped the ball, dropped his bat, broke for first, and the ball ended up hitting his bat," Scully recalled. "Birdie Tebbetts, the Braves' manager, got into a heated argument with the umpires over it, and finally announced that he was protesting the game.

"As he was walking back to the dugout, he went by our booth and hollered up, `Vinny, do you have a rule book?' I said, `Sure,' and I dropped it down to him. He flipped through the pages, finally shook his head and said something along the lines of `Darn it.' I asked him what was the story. He checked the rule and said he was going to have to withdraw his protest.

"So over the radio, I announced that Tebbetts had withdrew his protest before he even informed the umpires that's what he was going to do. That's a one-in-a-million situation."

Then there was a fun episode with an umpire having a birthday:

Scully remembers one night during a slow game looking through the Green Book - the National League publication of rosters, statistics, etc. - and saw that one of the umpires, Frank Secory, was celebrating a birthday.

"So that night, I spoke directly to the fans. I said, `Let's have some fun. Let's establish a baseball record. On the count of three, let's all holler, `Happy birthday Frank.' And the whole stadium did it. The game stopped for a second, and Secory was in the state of shock. One of the other umpires came over and explained to him that the fans had heard me tell them to do it on the radio.

Labels: angels, dodgers, radio