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Why The Delay On World Series Broadcast?

M

Mickey37

Guest
I'm driving home tonight,, and scanning the dial I pick up AM 1050, ESPN in New York. The World Series is on. So I flip it over to 1440 AM, and it's 5 seconds behind. What, they don't come out of delay for the games?

Not that it matters, unless you have the radio with you and you're at the game or watch it on tv with the volume down.
 
Mickey37 said:
I'm driving home tonight,, and scanning the dial I pick up AM 1050, ESPN in New York. The World Series is on. So I flip it over to 1440 AM, and it's 5 seconds behind. What, they don't come out of delay for the games?
Click to expand...

I suspect it has to do with cumulative delays through the digital equipment being used to transmit the games station to station or, perhaps one station has elected to maintain delay in defense against possible "excited utterance" of some offensive word.
 
it can also be how they receive the audio.

When I worked for MRBI, much of the programming for the night hours came from our sister station in NY via the internet. The windows media player buffering level would act as a digital delay.
 
the same thing would happen with weei and wxtk 95.1 on the cape
 
yeah i've noticed XTK is delayed a second or two on the broadcasts outta boston
 
Mickey37 said:
What, they don't come out of delay for the games?
Click to expand...

Most likely not. I presume AM 1440 is automated and there's no engineer on duty to line up the audio with the Fox 25 telecast.
 
Does 1440 still have their AM Stereo pilot light on? They still did a year ago at this time, though it's relaying a mono station. I haven't been out that way with an AM Stereo receiver this year.
 
what s_ucks is when I was driving home from Boston the other night, I could barely pick up the Series game most of the way. I know most Boston sports fans don't care if it's not SoxPats, but it's a shame the culmination of the baseball season is mainly inaudible in the Boston area.
 
I follow the baseball season up till the last out of the World Series. And I work nights at a post office with more machinery than a nuke plant.

In past years, WEEI would carry playoff/WS games, whether Red Sox were in it or not, and I could
pick them up marginally well (WRKO will come in even better for me next year). Then along came ESPN which
pulled their broadcasts from WEEI so that they could be on 890/1400 (carries more ESPN programming than
WEEI did...many ESPN shows plus Jim Rome from Premiere and their own Mike Felger show). WEEI wound up
picking up Fox Sports instead.

Problem of course is the weak night signals of 890 and 1400! So what I had to do was put a radio near the edge of our building and rig one of those mini-FM transmitters to broadcast it to where I was working. Last year it was pretty good since the games were on WBAL (strong signal) and if it didn't work I had Hartford's WPOP or NYC's WEPN to try. This year in the playoffs I also had option of WFAN for Mets games and WCBS for
Yankees games. (I think ESPN pulled themselves from WBAL to go onto a weaker station this year.)

Got to the point the past couple nights where even WPOP and WEPN were not coming in well..fading in
and out. I was getting a slightly stronger signal from WLLH 1400 (allegedly has an xmtr in Lawrence) and
even WAMG 890 (though soon enough it faded to WLS with Hannity, etc.)

Anyway, this happened in other cities too...like Cleveland where ESPN pulled their broadcasts from WKNR 850
just so they could be "24/7" on a much weaker station. They'd rather have a weaker station running all/most of their shows instead of partial affiliation on a stronger one. (And as it turned out, I understand WKNR wound up running the playoffs and WS anyway--because the station that'll eventually pick up ESPN is
a daytimer).

So picture this: WEEI might want to put baseball playoffs on, but ESPN 890/1400, as affiliates, have right of
first refusal. "SURE we'll take them!" So you have "follow the baseball playoffs on ESPN Boston"

But just try to pick up the signal :)

(And re: delay--during my lunch break at 11 pm someone had a portable TV and we were watching it on
Fox 25. There is def. a delay. During the last game of the NLCS I could hear Yadier Molina's decisive HR
being called on ESPN radio (I was listening on my Walkman) a few seconds before it showed up on TV.

If we had something like "Boston's ESPN 92.9 FM" I'd have no problem...FM for the most part is good in
my post office workplace. I'm kinda hoping Fox Sports Radio would pick up baseball (I doubt it though) so WEEI could carry it...
 
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