Major League Baseball is back and the Oakland Athletics are again available to fans on terrestrial radio in the Bay Area.
Since February, the A’s were planning to forgo a traditional radio partner for the 2020 season, but on Thursday, the club announced a return to the terrestrial airwaves in the form of iHeart’s Bloomberg 960 AM KNEW. Beginning Friday, July 31, the financial and business news station licensed in Oakland will carry the A’s remaining 54 games of the season.
During the 2019 season, Oakland Athletics games were heard locally on 860 The Answer, but the team also launched their streaming platform A’s Cast through an exclusive partnership with TuneIn. The club’s newly announced partnership with Bloomberg 960 will also see a digital shift for the organization, with A’s Cast moving from TuneIn to a larger platform in iHeart.
When the club announced in February that their radio broadcast would be on A’s Cast only, the decision was met with a lot of criticism by fans.
“We’ve always prided ourselves in listening to our fans,” A’s team president Dave Kaval told Shayna Rubin of The Mercury News. “And I think for a lot of fans, this was something that was important for them. We wanted to find an option that worked.”
In addition to listening to the fans, COVID-19 likely played a significant role as to why the A’s flipped on their digital-only plans just six games into the season. Local radio stations may have been more eager to pick up the adjusted 50-60 game shortened baseball schedule, than the 162 broadcasts the A’s were trying to sell in the winter.
“One of the biggest challenges we always had is the radio station, they just didn’t have the time to either sell us or partner with us for our games,” Kaval added when speaking with The Mercury News. “So, they’d say, ‘Oh, we’ll take 20 games or 40 games,’ but that doesn’t work. You can’t be on seven different channels.”
While fans now have a new way of consuming the games, not much changes for the A’s radio broadcasters. Announcers Ken Korach and Vince Cotroneo were already heard on A’s Cast and a dozen smaller stations outside the Bay Area, the new partnership with Bloomberg 960 will simply better serve their local fan base.