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HERB
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BOO CHILL
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For 52 years KMOX beamed St. Louis Cardinals games farther than, well, Minneapolis. When the Cardinals jumped that 50,000-watt flagship station for 5,000-watt KTRS this season it was such big news that two St. Louis television stations interrupted programming to carry the news conference. This was not a first. The Detroit Tigers left WJR three years ago. Next season, the Red Sox will move from WEEI to WRKO for $13 million, according to the Wall St. Journal. That's the largest such deal ever, and a meaningful one because local broadcast revenue is exempt from baseball's revenue sharing model. The Sox keep every sack of cash. If the Twins move to KSTP it will mean four teams have recently left megawatt stations for signals with less reach. WCCO's signal is a 50,000-watt fastball while KSTP's electromagnetic waves have a knuckleball's wobble. Part of a trendWhat's the story? Well, the flagship station's value has been diluted. MLB.com streams games over the Internet. That and XM satellite radio mean a Seattle native in Miami can tune in every Mariners' game. This dilution was KMOX's concern. So KMOX proposed to the Cardinals a revenue sharing plan that offered less guaranteed money but allowed the Cardinals to more than make up the difference in advertising sales. The Cards instead purchased a half stake in KTRS, a niche station that was looking to boost its Arbitron ratings and willing to bid higher for sports programming. The Cardinals gained more control over ad sales; XM radio plugs the holes in the KTRS network. That's because after XM Satellite Radio agreed last year to broadcast every major league game over the next 11 seasons for $650 million, subscribers vaulted from 2.5 million to 6 million. An XM survey found that 23 percent of those subscribers signed on primarily for baseball. At a subscription fee of $12.95 per month, that's $120 million per year in new XM revenue directly attributable to baseball. This trend is just radio playing catchup to television. About 15 years ago 80 percent of locally broadcast baseball was available with a set of rabbit ears. Today, pay TV carries about 80 percent of those games. The world changes. The Twins breaking with WCCO just might be an acceptable change for one reason: Herb Carneal is winding down his Twins' broadcasting career, and now works about as many innings as right-handed setup man Juan Rincon each season. 'Herb Carneal taught me baseball'
Carneal is so rarely part of summer's soundtrack these days that sometimes a few batters have swung before a WCCO listener realizes Carneal is in the booth. It takes awhile to notice Carneal because, as former Detroit Tigers' announcer Ernie Harwell was saying one afternoon a few summers back, good baseball announcers go unnoticed, like good umpires or someone capably driving through traffic. Harwell was specifically chatting about Carneal. "I think the real touch of art is making things look easy," Harwell was saying. "In America, everyone thinks he can build a fire, run a hotel, write a song and broadcast a baseball game. There are a lot of things you have to report on in a game, and I think Herb has a degree of ability that's so consistent and so consistently high that you take him for granted." Harwell, who did his last broadcast in 2002, and Carneal once traveled with their teams. Harwell favored Carneal as a well-read, fascinating dinner companion who was a student of economics. Yet Harwell struggled to summon an extraordinary anecdote about Carneal. Bob San has one. After arriving in the U.S. from China at age 16 he found himself working as a janitor at the University of Minnesota while he put himself through college. San has been known to attend more than 50 Twins games a season, but he reached college without having seen a baseball game. Night time janitorial work at the U was boring, but a radio was always on. San's American buddies listened to baseball. Carneal painted pictures as San mopped floors. One day San decided to catch a bus to Metropolitan Stadium to see what this game was all about. "It was just like Herb Carneal described it," San recalls. "Herb would talk about the 6-4-3 double play. And there it was. I understood everything perfectly. "It was a revelation. Like religion. "Herb Carneal taught me baseball." The work becomes a challengeImagine explaining something your listener has never seen in their second language, and making the subject and jargon understandable. Praise doesn't reach any higher, but Carneal thought high praise might be elusive when he arrived reluctantly in Minneapolis at age 37. He was unknown in the market and uncertain how he would be received in the midwest. The Richmond, Virginia native had worked in Baltimore since 1957 at a time when Hamm's Brewery owned the Orioles' advertising rights. Hamm's acquired the Twins' rights in '61; Carneal was offered a job in the booth the next season. It was a potentially great opportunity in a field that fascinated Carneal so much that after playing amateur baseball in Richmond and planning to enroll at Syracuse University he instead found himself knocking on the doors of Syracuse radio stations. One station offered him a job.
It is likely Carneal would be long forgotten had he been a good enough ballplayer to make the major leagues. As an announcer, he has enjoyed remarkable longevity in a single market and has received the National Baseball Hall of Fame's Ford Frick Award, an honor he shares with 30 other broadcasters, including Harwell. But the job is a challenge for a man of 82. It wasn't long ago that Carneal would arrive at the Metrodome around 4:30 p.m., hours before his voice would reach into the night air thick with humidity to greet fans with, "Well, hi, everybody. This is Herb Carneal." The ritual would begin with Carneal creating the night's big-league schedule by penciling teams in pairs onto a yellow legal pad. Computers spit out updated scores during the game, but he preferred this habit. Carneal would then descend steep flights of stairs into the Metrodome's basement field and chat with players before climbing the steps to the booth to record some segments. He'd head back down the stairs to eat, and between bites of a meal and conversation he would study press notes, but not too much. He said announcers who over-prepared tended to inappropriately cram all that knowledge into a broadcast. Carneal would repeat the pattern on the road, which 20 years ago might mean a late-night getaway flight from Cleveland would take him and the Twins into Hamilton, Canada rather than to Toronto. Toronto had late-night noise curfews that restricted early morning travel into the city, so the team would bus 50 miles to Toronto and sleepwalk into the hotel lobby at 5 a.m. That schedule eventually separates octogenarian announcers from younger counterparts, even one who maintained a strict routine. He said routine, proper rest and a sensible diet smoothed out the lifestyle, which meant he abstained from green onions during the game. That came against the advice of Halsey Hall. Carneal's broadcast partner from 1962-72, Hall enjoyed a press box diet of Muriel cigars and onions, maintaining to Carneal that onions were "scavengers of the stomach." It might be difficult for Twins' fans to believe that it's been nearly three decades since Halsey established residency in Section L, Grave 405 of Fort Snelling National Military Cemetery. So it's understandable why fans think their team's association with WCCO has been all too short. But fans survived Harmon Killebrew signing with Kansas City and Rod Carew going to California; Tommy Herr's arrival and Frankie Viola's departure. Kirby Puckett's death. A baseball team leaving a radio station isn't the end of the world, and after all, Twins' fans have been fortunate because Herb Carneal taught us baseball.
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