Oakland A’s become first MLB team to ditch local radio for streaming

Oakland residents hoping to listen to the city’s last remaining major pro sports team on the radio this year are in for a rude awakening.

The Oakland A’s announced on Tuesday that they would become the first Major League Baseball team to ditch a local radio broadcast for a streaming-only solution. Fans can listen to games through the TuneIn mobile app for free as long as they live in the A’s northern California media market, and the experience will otherwise be identical to before, with the same broadcasters calling games like they always have.

But if you live in the city of Oakland, you’ll no longer be able to turn on the radio in your home or your car and listen to the game, in what feels like something of a tragic development for the beleaguered sports town. In case you hadn’t heard, the NBA’s Warriors recently moved to San Francisco and the NFL’s Raiders officially belong to Las Vegas.

Now, the only team left in town won’t even be on the radio, at least not locally. Curiously, games will still be on the radio in some cities, the closest of which is Sacramento. The A’s positioned the announcement as forward-thinking, but the Mercury News pointed out that the A’s just didn’t renew their previous local radio deal. Oakland’s baseball team has been been incredibly mercenary with local radio, living on more than a dozen different stations since moving to the city in 1968.

It was only a matter of time before a major North American pro sports franchise made a move like this, as the world seemingly agrees that streaming is the future. But it should be questioned whether or not the future needed to be now, specifically with this sport. 

After all, recent Nielsen Scarbrough data found that pro baseball is most popular with people aged 50 to 69, a demographic one could reasonably assume might prefer to listen on the radio instead of using a mobile app. Separate data from the same research group concluded that baseball is more popular on the radio than other U.S. sports, too.

Maybe the A’s will be vindicated for this move years down the line. It’s totally possible that younger fans will be more drawn to baseball if the game lives on their phones rather than on the radio. That said, it’s worth wondering if the move to TuneIn will only inconvenience some of the A’s biggest fans instead.