The Pecan Park Eagle

“YUM!!! – THIS BASEBALL TALK RADIO TASTES GOOD!”
– Thousands of Main Line, Car-Driving Houston Baseball Fans

If you are a “Cheerio” or “Wheaties” particle, you can only think outside the box for a very short time before you get eaten.

The Pecan Park Eagle is hardly a cereal particle, although one could argue that the depth of our columns sometimes places us in that category. We like to think the generally wading pool depth we deliver on the subjects we embrace is our matter of choice, and not a manifestation of our limitations. We subscribe to the philosophy that column-writing over the Internet manifests from the complex needs of both the writer and the reader, but that in the end, it remains all about communication, and that communication is always about contact for the purpose of dispensing or sharing information that is either educational, entertaining, and/or worthy of interaction on some question of action or change that seems needed.

That mouthful being said, the subject today again is the disappointing state of sports talk radio and the possibility of one suggested remedy that could work, if it is done right by the right savvy people.

Yesterday we had some business out at the Astrodome and the car radio came on tuned to 790 AM where the two former NFL players were already in deep rapture over a football discussion. I punched the button for a change to 610 AM, but all  fell into there were two guys doing a rather expansive post-mortem of the Rockets loss in the NBA basketball finals of a week ago.

As I quickly switched to my big band music station on Sirius Satellite radio, I was also reminded of how pleasant it was to hear Larry Dierker back on the air last weekend in conjunction with the Astros broadcast. Then the thought burst through, again, in just-out-of-the-box cereal form: “Why can’t we have an All Baseball Talk Radio Station – or, at least, a station which does all baseball talk material during the primary rush hour times when people are listening to talk radio. We have no specific data on how many listeners tune in to sports talk radio at home, but our guess is that those folks are about 1% tops. It’s the “out-and-about” driver that keeps radio alive.

Yeah, we know it’s all about market share and the value that programs add to the price of advertising, but we do have a lot baseball fans in this town too. Who among us would not prefer listening to people like Larry Dierker, Bill Brown, Greg Lucas, Jimmy Wynn, Art Howe, just to name a few, along with a baseball-deep knowledgeable guy like Charlie Pallilo, Craig Roberts or Mike Vance thrown into the mix somewhere, over what we have now?

I’m not sure of the actual prime hour ranges such programming would embrace, but the people I’ve just named could figure that out – along with the kind of programming that would work best in sating the appetites of Astros fans and people who really care about the history and rich story lore of the game. The baseball call-in fans, certainly, a smaller number of the baseball fan listening audience, would then have a program choice that spared them long waits on the phone behind football knee injury callers at all of the other places. We think that such a program could attract the thousands of primary baseball fans like the old “bears to honey” metaphor has suggested forever. And the listening needs of these baseball bear fans have been in hibernation on the programming schedules of all other local broadcasters for a very long time.

How about it? Do we simply eat this idea with all the usual dismissive sauce from the “can’t-be-done” company – or does anyone out there have the guts to take this on? The Pecan Park Eagle believes that thousands of Houston area daily car-driving baseball fans would be ecstatic, if you did.