America’s Pastime Still Plays Best on the Radio.

A great American tradition will mark its 104th anniversary this summer.

It was Aug. 5, 1921, when Illinois-born Harold Arlin, a 25-year-old engineer, commercially broadcast the first professional baseball game for Pittsburgh’s KDKA. In many respects, Arlin’s call of the hometown Pirates game against the visiting Philadelphia Phillies at Forbes Field marked the first shot of a revolution — one that more than a century later is still accompanied by a kind of romance that, while undeniably present, can be hard to explain.

“Baseball is paced in a way that you really can paint a picture that allow people to feel like they’re there,” Jared Sandler, a radio broadcaster for the Texas Rangers, tells Annenberg Media, which is a student-led multiplatform news media that’s overseen and funded by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

According to Annenberg Media, radio’s enduring relevance starts before most fans are really paying attention — during Spring Training. With teams preparing for the regular season in warm-weather locales like Florida and Arizona and meaningless exhibition games under way, fans have relatively few options to easily watch. The Rangers, Annenberg notes, had 33 Spring Training games this year — but only eight aired on TV.

But at the Rangers’ spring headquarters in Surprise, AZ, a team of people makes it possible for Rangers fans around the world to follow all the action via radio. Those fans represent a different, hyper-dedicated brand of fandom, willing to suspend the visual in exchange of a broadcaster painting a picture of what’s unfolding on the field.

Sandler, like many broadcasters before him, is acutely aware of baseball’s standing as a game that’s uniquely suited to the world of audio. “The pace of baseball allows for so many different styles and elements of creativity,” he says. “I think the ability to weave in stories and information and conversation into the broadcast is unique.”

Sandler, a lifetime Rangers fan, says baseball on the radio was a form of childhood therapy. Back then Sandler would listen to longtime Rangers broadcaster Eric Nadel, who remains the team’s primary play-by-play voice.

“When I’d go to sleep, I didn’t have a TV in my room, but I had a little radio, and so I’d listen to whatever sporting event was on locally, or if there wasn’t a live game on, then I’d listen to sports talk,” Sandler says. “And that’s how I would fall asleep pretty much every night, for however many years.”

Now, Sandler, who works primarily as a studio host but fills in on play-by-play, works the man he grew up listening to. (Matt Hicks is also in the radio booth, with Eleno Ornelas handling Spanish play-by-play commentary.)

Sandler, however, has concerns about radio’s viability for long-term baseball broadcasting, especially in a world with rapidly evolving technology and the proliferation of digital.

“How much are we going to create an individual lane for radio, rather than just more simulcasting and stuff of that nature and taking away having a dedicated radio broadcast?” Sandler asks. “I hope that’s not the case, but I also couldn’t sit here and definitively tell you that it’s not.”

That’s said, it’s still here — 104 years after Harold Arlin used a converted telephone as a microphone and described the action from behind home plate, and underscoring the reality that like the game itself, baseball on the radio is timeless.