Good summary. Mutual went through several ownership changes in the 50's before RKO General (mostly a tire company) sold Mutual to 3M (Scotch Tape and billboards), and RKO General dropped Mutual on its station. Mutual also lost other major market stations at the time (including WGN, WIP, KQV) as well as the InterMountain Network and the Texas Network. They went through a scandal about their cash deal with a Carribean dictator to provide favorable news coverage which pretty much destroyed any news credibility. They ended up mostly with affiliate left-overs (stations the three major networks would not bother with), weak sticks, small markets and a lot of geographic holes in their coverage. They ran a lot of sports because they could clear it and sell it, and that part of Mutual survives in Westwood One's sports unit. And, for practical purposes, Mutual was re-born as WOR's WOR Network - which is pretty much what Mutual was.
> I believe the reason the World Series left Mutual Radio
> after the mid 1950's was because the network was losing a
> lot of money at the time and it's future was not by any
> means certain.
>
> Mutual was originally owned by it's larger affiliates, but
> when the network's original ownership structure decided to
> sell, three of the "founding fathers" of Mutual (WOR-710 New
> York, the Yankee Network in New England, and Don Lee
> Broadcasting in California, all three of which had by the
> midfifties been purchased by RKO General) dropped
> affiliation.
>
> MLB probably figured Mutual's problems weren't worth it, so
> radio broadcasts for the World Series went to NBC, which had
> already become the exclusive home of the Series on
> television.
>
> As had been noted, Mutual continued to broadcast Notre Dame
> football games for many years (and as Mutual/Westwood One,
> still does), and during the 1970's, broadcast some
> Sunday-afternoon NFL games nationally, as well as
> Monday-night NFL games in the early 1970's.
>
> I'm not 100% certain, but I thought Mutual also broadcast
> both the NHL's Stanley Cup Finals and the NBA Finals for at
> least part of the 1970's. I'm tempted to say that Marty
> Glickman called one of these events (I think it was the
> Stanley Cup) for MBS during the early 1970's.
>