Examining baseball broadcasting pioneers that first brought the game to life.
For 22 years, Ty Cobb roamed the outfield grass for the Detroit Tigers, carving out a Hall of Fame career that produced double-digit batting titles.
The Georgia Peach was synonymous with Tigers baseball in the early 1900s, and he was certainly the city’s most famous “Ty”.
But in 1927, one season after Cobb left the Tigers for the Philadelphia Athletics, a new Ty was on the scene in Detroit. This one carried a microphone instead of a bat.
While Cobb was headed to Pennsylvania, Tyson traveled in the opposite direction, from his native Tyrone, PA to the Motor City.
Tyson held several jobs as a young man, including working as a coal miner, mercantile appraiser and wallpaper salesman. He also dabbled in acting. But it would be a career in sports broadcasting that would bring Tyson the most fame.
Tyson accepted a job offer from WWJ Radio in 1924 to come to Detroit. At the time, WWJ was widely recognized as the first commercial radio station in the country. Shortly after arriving, Tyson began his foray into the not yet cultivated world of sports broadcasting.
He announced the first University of Michigan football game. On October 18, 1924, Tyson described the Wolverines 21-0 win over the Wisconsin Badgers in Ann Arbor. His baseball career was still three years away.
In April of 1927, Tyson delivered the first radio broadcast of Detroit Tigers baseball.
There is a certain freedom that comes with being a pioneer in any industry, but especially in broadcasting. There were no previous styles with which to compare Tyson. He was the standard. Today, for instance, young broadcasters may be compared by old-timers to Vin Scully, Ernie Harwell or Jack Buck. All Hall of Fame announcers who are considered to be the benchmark by many.
Tyson had no such obstacle and he took advantage of this opportunity, forging a connection with some of the most loyal baseball fans in the game. To this day, Tigers fans remain some of the most loyal followers in the sport. That connection certainly helped ease the bumps of creating something new.
He featured a straight forward, no nonsense, descriptive style that Tigers fans soon came to love. He blended his playing experience as a youth with a keen sense of drama to excel at his craft. There is no doubt that Tyson’s background at Penn State University came in handy. Tyson took acting classes in college and he soon learned that baseball broadcasting featured many elements of the acting training he received in school.
So, the Tigers carved out a spot in the press box for Tyson to perform, and WWJ installed several crowd microphones to enhance the broadcast.
Tyson described a 7-0 Tigers win over the St. Louis Browns with Ed Whitehill spinning a 4-hit shutout for the Bengals. With that, Tigers baseball broadcasts were born.
Despite their popularity, the broadcasts were unsponsored for the first seven years before Mobile Oil became a sponsor.
For road games, Tyson would often provide re-creations, again leaning on his acting background.
Tyson covered the Tigers until he retired in 1942. In 1947, when the Tigers televised their first game, Tyson returned to the broadcast booth and continued to work Tigers games until his ultimate retirement in 1952.
