The Payphone Stadium Project
From SABR member Larry Granillo at Baseball Prospectus on February 13, 2012:
It was a strange time, 1990. “The Simpsons” were on the air, an out-of-touch Massachusetts politician was fighting for relevancy, a man who couldn’t spell “potato” was one breath away from the presidency, and Jose Canseco was trying his hardest to look like a idiot to anyone who would pay attention to him.
In this age of M.C. Hammer parachute pants, Axl Rose whistle-solos, and the long, flowing, luxurious… golden… taste-of-heaven locks of Michael Bolton, one man saw a glaring need among the country’s baseball fans. It was a pre-internet world. Cell phones were still reserved for the Gordon Gecko’s and Zack Morris’s of the world, and even cable television was a luxury for most of the nation. If a Reds fan, for example, was living in Seattle and wanted to know how that day’s Jose Rijo/Frank Viola match-up was going, he had little choice but to wait until the next day’s paper to see the results. If he was lucky, he might have one of those giant, eight-foot satellite dishes out in his yard, but even then he was probably leasing its use to NASA or using it as a fallout shelter rather than watching television with it.
The point is that in 1990 it was impossible for someone to know what exactly was happening in a live game if they weren’t living in radio- or television-broadcast range of the game, and the world was a worse-place for it. That June, Beckett Baseball Card Monthly senior editor Pepper Hastings finally had enough of this medieval situation and decided to do something about it.
Read the full article here: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=16022
Originally published: February 13, 2012. Last Updated: February 13, 2012.