Idiots Write About Sports

If you live on the West Coast, at some point in time, you will find yourself driving up and/or down Interstate Five, that stretch of highway that takes you from San Diego to Seattle and all points in between. The portion of the I-5 that I have spent too much time traversing as of late runs from Los Angeles up to the edge of Alameda County — a seemingly endless patch of farmland, state prisons, fast-food chains… and lousy, lousy radio reception when it comes to baseball broadcasts.

A typical trek down the I-5 from the office in the Bay Area to my Los Angeles estate begins with me listening to the A’s game on the flagship station. But, since an obscure FCC regulation apparently requires all A’s broadcasts to originate from a boat just outside of international waters, the signal usually begins to weaken just after I’ve sped through the Altamont Pass. Thus begins the three-hour potion of the journey that features me frantically scanning the AM dial, hoping to pick up another station on the A’s radio network before that signal inevitably weakens and the search begins anew.

This past Sunday found us on the I-5 just south of Kettleman City as we attempt to track down the Dodgers-White Sox game by scrolling idlely across the AM dial. (The Oakland-Philadelphia game had long since been completed, requiring only two station changes.) After a 10-minute search that gave us Art Bell eulogizing his recently deceased cat and an evangelical Christian talk program about how the women-folk should really know their role and not aspire to have things like careers or opinions or other frivolities (“Service does not necessarily mean servitude,” one of the guests helpfully chirped, as my wife turned eight shades of crimson), we finally happened upon Charley Steiner and Rick Monday slogging through another Dodger loss… until the signal crapped out, leaving us high and dry until The Grapevine.

Heaven forfend that the A’s not complete their games in a prompt and speedy fashion when I’m on one of these trips. Last year, I left the comforts of my parents’ home in Contra Costa County, just as the A’s were blowing a ninth-inning lead to the Minnesota Twins. By the time Oakland mounted a rally in the top of the 18th, I had made it to Buttonwillow — well beyond the reach of the A’s feeble radio network. That game ended with my mother narrating the action over a cell phone to my wife who then passed on the play-by-play to me while I white-knuckled the steering wheel.

About this time you may be saying, “Michaels, if you need to listen to ballgames so badly, why are you bothering your poor mother or exposing yourself to the vagaries of the AM band? Why not just pony up for XM Satellite Radio and its MLB package?”

To which I respond, “Well, if it’s that simple, Rich Uncle Moneybags, why don’t you just float me the money to pay for the hardware and service, and we’ll call it square?” Seriously — I’m already dropping 120 bones a year to get hundreds of television games piped into my home on top of the money I shell out to see games live and in person. Outlaying even more cash for radio broadcasts that I should be able to pick up for free would seem like I’m moving into champagne-bath and lighting-my-cigars-with-$20-bills territory.

After our latest cross-California escapade, my wife did some digging and came up with a list of the radio affiliates for four of the five California-based Major League teams. (Say… apparently, that little talk about women needing to do the bidding of their husbands we heard on the radio really had an affect on her. If I had just known that, I would have forced her to listen to AM radio much sooner in our marriage.) As a public service for anyone who finds themselves making that L.A.-to-San Francisco drive any time soon, I present the fruits of my wife’s research. If I can save but one reader from the horrors of randomly stumbling across AM talk radio nutbags, I’ll have done my good deed for the day.

To hear the Oakland As
———————————
580 AM Medford, OR KTMT
590 AM South Lake Tahoe KTHO
610 AM San Francisco KFRC
630 AM Reno, NV KPTT
950 AM Auburn KAHI
970 AM Modesto KESP
1270 AM Lakeport KXBX
1340 AM San Luis Obispo KYNS
1340 AM Elko, NV KTSN
1380 AM Salinas KZFX
1410 AM Lompoc KTME
1410 AM Marysville KMYC ***
1430 AM Fresno KFIG *
1440 AM Santa Maria KUHL
1450 AM Sonora KVML
1480 AM Merced KYOS *
1490 AM King City KRKC
1490 AM Roseburg OR KRNR
1560 AM Willows KIQS **

101.5 FM Eureka KEKA
102.3 FM Weed/Mt.Shasta KNTK

* Nights/weekends only
** Days only
*** Nights only

To hear the L.A. Dodgers
————————————
610 AM Lancaster/Palmdale KAVL
920 AM Palm Springs KPSI
980 AM Los Angeles KFWB
1150 AM Albuquerque KDEF
1220 AM Santa Clarita KHTS
1230 AM Bishop KBOV
1300 AM Brawley/El Centro KROP
1340 AM Fresno KCBL
1400 AM Visalia KVBL
1450 AM Ventura/Oxnard KVEN
1490 AM Banning KMET
1560 AM Bakersfield KNZR

99.7 FM San Luis Obispo/Santa Maria KKAL

To hear the S.F. Giants
———————————-
680 AM San Francisco, CA KNBR
1340 AM Eureka, CA KATA
1430 AM Fresno, CA KFIG
1400 AM San Luis Obispo, CA KKJL
1670 AM Redding, CA KNRO

92.7 FM/96.7 FM Mendocino, CA KMFB
94.1 FM Merced, CA KBKY
102.3 FM Mt. Shasta, CA KWHO

To hear the Anaheim Angels
—————————————
600 AM Jamestown, ND KSJB
800 AM San Diego, CA XEMM
1450 AM Palm Springs, CA KGAM
1510 AM Ontario, CA KSPA
1520 AM Ventura, CA KVTA

What about the Padres?

Since we're generally scanning the dial on the road between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and since Major League territorial rules don't let the Padres broadcast in Dodger and Angel territory, my wife didn't run a search for Padre stations.

In fact, searching now, the only ones I could find are KOGO and XEMO (the Spanish-language broadcast). Both stations seem to be in San Diego County only.

Maybe the Padres have an affiliate in Imperial County or in their old spring-training haunt of Yuma, but if they do, they keep very quiet about it.

Thanks for the comments and the list... I'll print it out and stick it in the glove box. By the way... the A's contract with KFRC can't expire soon enough. Nothing like listening to a great A's game on the way home at night, and then climbing into the car the next day and getting blasted by some GodTalk DJ.

And as long as you've gone all Hollywood media on us NorCal fans, why not do some good old fashioned investigative journalism... The Doonesbury strip from Sunday (6/19/05) is exactly the same as the one from 9/26/04 - concernng the use of the word "actually" in Hollywood. What was supposed to run last week? We anxiously await your response...

"the A's contract with KFRC can't expire soon enough"

Oh man, you're telling me.

Although the disclaimers the religious station runs before and after A's broadcasts -- "We're not responsible for any of this, the contracts force us to run this godless filth, and we pray for all of you heathen, especially you, Scutaro" -- are the highest of high comedy.

By the way, the actual quote -- which is seared on my cerebral cortex until the drinking manages to kill that particular clump of brain cells -- is this:

"There's nothing servile about servitude."

Really? So both having the Latin servus, or slave, as their etymological root is a BIG coincidence?

Don't speak badly now or think bad thoughts, and maybe the KFRC God will help the A's get above 500 for good. And in the morning at 6:55 they've got comedy on. It's "Creation Moments." I didn't realize that Darwin had it all wrong...silly me.

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