Pure Baseball As Televised July 8, 1972
What is wrong with baseball telecasts today?
Just about everything.
Before cable television, baseball was usually televised only in your local broadcast area, if there was a major league team within your market. Otherwise you could tune into only one nationally broadcast game on Saturday, aptly named the “Game of the Week.”
To display the differences in how baseball was once presented involves simply taking a look back.
Billy Williams photo: 1972 Topps
This game between the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds is from July 8 1972, 53 years ago today. The game was originally televised in color, but this is a kinescope black and white copy.
We do not expect most of our readers to watch the full two plus hours shown here. And you don’t necessarily need to. A few minutes viewing will clearly demonstrate the decline in presentation.
What You WIll See
The most obvious difference is the quality of the broadcasters. The two men calling the game, Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek are superb. Neither subject the audience to hyperbole, off-topic discussions or talking for the sake of talking. They do not shout, they do not fawn over routine plays or explain the obvious. The most noticeable difference is that they let the game flow. The broadcasters allow periods of silence so the viewer can hear the ambient sounds of the ballpark. There is no music blaring in the background. There are no ads interrupting the flow of the game every couple of minutes.
Take notice of the variety of camera angles- especially the behind the plate views both high and low angles. Seeing how the fielders are positioned for each batter adds immeasurably to the game. A split screen is displayed when a fast runner reaches base so viewers can see a stolen base in real time. There’s also the limiting of replay to a few highlights, and not repeating every mundane moment.
The limited use of graphics and a non-cluttered screen allows for concentrating on the game. The absence of a nonstop informational ribbon running along the bottom of the screen is a relief. Of course there is no strike zone indicator box, as that abomination was not introduced until 2011 by the brilliant minds at ESPN.
How the players approach and play the game, we will not even comment upon, as most vestiges of dignified competition and rivalry have virtually disappeared today. Seeing ballplayers like Billy Williams, Ron Santo, Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan and Tony Perez, play, is a joy in itself.
Old vs. New
Surely there are many modern viewers who have never seen baseball in this manner and will disagree with the conclusion, that televised baseball was superior 40 plus years ago compared with today.
There are millions of people who enjoy a plethora of information. They also like multiple people in the broadcast booth making inane observations. Cameras showing super slo-mo of a swing and miss or connecting with a baseball are believed to be positive improvements. These people relish six replays of a swing. They like watching the exact same view of the game on every pitch from center field. They don’t mind constant commercial interruptions during the game. Gambling odds of any tangential outcome keep interest from flagging.
We have become a distracted society. So the idea of simply watching and listening to a game without distractions may be unsettling to anyone under a certain age. What that age is cannot be easily defined. Probably the age when you realize that sometimes less is more.
Thanks for pulling this together – I grew up in a later period of watching ball but still had the same love for baseball that I can tell you did when this video was from in 1972.
I’m 42 and grew up a Cubs fan watching WGN in the Indiana market. Some of my fondest memories are coming home from school as a 9-13 year old and watching afternoon games – this would have been early 90’s. I loved Steve Stone and Harry Carey, and I loved all things baseball. This era of baseball was still pretty similar to the 1972 game, though WGN likely showed a lot more cute women in the crowd that Harry would go out of his way to notice.
In 2025, I still love baseball – watching it, going to the games, listening to it on the radio, coaching my 13 year old, and the current Cubs team as well. I miss some things about 90’s baseball but not the quality of the telecast (which looking back ) looks pretty muddied compared to the HD broadcasts we get today. The 1972 telecast does have great angles and I like how it was shot but man, the quality is tough for me to watch. I agree with you completely on the announcers – too often we have lost great tv announcers due to the economics of baseball compared to the super channel and no cable days.
As for the modern game, I like the pitch count and how it has sped the game back up to to more like it was in the very game you shared. The extra runner they put on on second base in extra innings is a travesty. I loath the DH but see no way it will ever end. I would prefer pitchers weren’t such incredible athletes – all of these guys throwing 100 MPH with 2300+ RPM on their fastballs means that the batters have it harder than they did back in earlier eras which leads to lower averages. And it also means that the pitchers break down at a much higher rate.
I don’t mind the batters celebrating or competing players smiling and chatting with each other. But I hate the constant push for gambling and the on screen and on field ads.
I miss WGN but I have the Marquee Network and can stream almost every Cubs game using that. It isn’t the same as turning on the tv right after school as a 10 year old but hey, what is?
3 weeks ago my fam and I were able to travel up to Detroit and then to Toronto to watch games at those stadiums for the first time ever. Live baseball is still my favorite way to watch it and both experiences, despite the outlandish fees, were fantastic.
Thanks for sharing your perspective and passion. It’s good to hear other points of view on a variety of baseball’s virtues and faults though we may disagree on some of them.
I watched this game on Sunday, so I was just a little ahead of the schedule. Baseball as I remember it. Gowdy and Kubek and later Joe Garagiola. I believe it was Pat Summerall who once said about silence during a broadcast: “Why would I talk over what’s happening when the viewer can plainly see it?” We need a lot more silence nowadays, especially in our sports broadcasts.
In the 1960s, I’d occasionally watch Red Sox games with my dad, who was a big fan of the team. They aired on one of the local Boston stations — channel 7, probably — when Curt Gowdy was their announcer in his pre-network days. Your piece reminded me of the ambient stadium sound throughout the game. No yelling or screaming (except when for a hit or homerun), just a constant, soft hum like an air conditioner. It sounded like summer to me. Oh, and everybody in New England loved Curt Gowdy.
Some organ music, vendors and fans talking and reacting- the sound of summer inside a ballpark is an accurate description.
Even outside of New England, I never heard anyone say the did not love Curt Gowdy.