Internet Fandom and the Seattle Mariners, Part 2: Netcasts and Newsgroups
Mariners fans posted in cyberspace as the team itself disseminated the accounts and descriptions of its games without the express written consent of Major League Baseball.
Welcome back to my series on the ways Mariner fandom drove and was influenced by the development of the internet. In Part 1, we learned the Mariners were the first professional sports team to have a website on the World Wide Web:
Today, we’re going to look at the way the sports internet grew from the first, basic websites and began to change how we consume sports. Naturally, the Mariners led the way.
On August 5, 1921 the first baseball game was broadcast over commercial radio waves as Harold Arlin described in real time the Pittsburgh Pirates beating the Philadelphia Phillies.1 Sporadic broadcasts followed, as did territorial disputes and ownership hand wringing about losing ticket sales to radio games. But radio gave baseball the opportunity to make money on broadcast deals, so the medium became a popular way to follow the sport by the end of the 1930s.
Radio broadcasts were eventually overtaken in numbers by television broadcasts, but they remained popular. Even now, radio baseball is comforting background noise, a way to safely follow the game in a car, and a quick trip to a simpler time. It is classic story telling, unhurried, where the words and the style of telling are as important as the plot.
Radio has been important to Mariners fans. The team only had sporadic television broadcasts in the early years, but we could always turn on the radio. For many of us, those broadcasts were the soundtrack of our summers and childhoods. It was a nearly universal experience to mute the national broadcast on television and turn up our radios so we could listen to Dave Niehaus narrating the first Mariners postseason run in 1995.
Even though the Mariners didn’t exist until long after radio was established as an essential part of baseball life, there was still ground to break.
On September 5, 1995, the Mariners and Yankees joined the 1921 Pirates and Phillies in radio history. It was the first ever streaming radio broadcast. The game was played in New York at Yankee Stadium, but the technology that made it happen was all Seattle.
Local billionaire Paul Allen used his interactive computer products company, Starwave Corp., to launch a sports information product called Satchel. Named after Satchel Paige, the Satchel Sports webpage was a revelation of internet sports sites and featured “a continuously updated feed of scores, stats, news and photos, and a developing menu of exclusive features and columns.”2
When ESPN wanted to update its ESPNET website, they met with Starwave and decided to combine forces. The new site, ESPNET.SportsZone.com, immediately became one of the most popular destinations on the World Wide Web. The site was administered locally at Starwave’s Bellevue offices by “technojocks”, as Wired magazine called them, and launched in early April 1995 during the Men’s Final Four, which was played in Seattle at the Kingdome.
ESPNET.SportsZone.com was determined to be the essential place for online sports fans, so they were always ready to implement new technologies. Seattle-based Progressive Networks’ RealAudio product allowed personal computer users to listen to audio online. ABC News streamed their Nightly News with Peter Jennings, NPR streamed Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and a number of talk shows and radio programs were available. The next step was to stream a broadcast as it happened.
The CEO of Progressive Networks was Rob Glasser. Glasser just so happened to hold an ownership share in the Mariners. To him, streaming a radio broadcast was the perfect way to promote RealAudio and push the technological envelope. So, ESPN, through Starwave, provided the online destination, RealAudio provided the tech, and KIRO Radio, the Mariner’s flagship station, provided the broadcast.
Anyone with a computer that could play sound had the capability to listen to the broadcast, provided they also paid a $4.95 monthly subscription fee for ESPNET SportsZone’s premium service. In reality, only a few hundred people at a time could listen to the broadcast due to “technical limitations.”3
Interestingly, there was only the barest mention of the upcoming live stream in the newspapers. Perhaps this makes sense; it was more of a curiosity than an exciting new way to follow baseball then. Newspaper writers were occupied by stories about the Mariners’ nascent playoff run—they’d just won 7 of their last 11 games—and the pending vote to finance a new baseball-only stadium. In the wider baseball world, the focus was on Baltimore as Cal Ripken was ready to tie and break Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games played record.
On September 5, the Mariners held on to beat the Yankees 6-5 at Yankee Stadium, and made history as the very first public live stream in internet history.4 On September 6th, Ripken broke the unbreakable record and the Mariners and Yankees played another game that was broadcast over the internet.
Baseball’s treasured and revered artifacts found themselves staring ahead at the 21st century.
*****
Other teams followed the Mariners and began broadcasting games over the internet. Some streams ran through the teams’ webpage and others were streamed over the radio station’s website. Over the next couple years, more tech companies created streaming products and the barriers to streaming broadcasts dropped, making it ever more enticing to major league teams to expand their audiences.
A few months after the Mariners-Yankees internet radio debut, Major League Baseball signed a 5-year $1.7 billion television rights deal with Fox, NBC, ESPN, and Liberty Media (who owned Prime Sports)5. Although Acting-Commissioner-for life Bud Selig called it a “significant step in the recovery of our sport”, referring to the player’s strike that ended the 1994 season early, the deal did not include any provisions for internet broadcasts or streaming.
The Sun Sentinel noted that “the negotiators didn't seem to realize that by the time that five-year deal ends, the way fans see and hear their favorite games will have completely changed.”6 At the time the deal was signed, Starwave had a contract with NBA.com to broadcast the audio of several games and NBA radio networks planned to stream games over station websites. The NHL signed a deal earlier that year with AudioNet to stream all their games on the NHL’s homepage.
Major League Baseball, as it is wont to do, did not address the situation until well after the Rubicon had been crossed. Teams were running wild across the ‘Net before MLB had even begun to consider putting together policies or streaming broadcast deals.
On April 14, 1997, MLB told teams they needed to stop internet streaming. By streaming radio, MLB said they were violating broadcasting rules that prohibited broadcasts within 50 miles of another team’s local market. The Mariners immediately stopped their streaming, but others did not. The Baltimore Orioles and Houston Astros both flat out ignored the order, and the Los Angeles Dodgers asked their flagship station to stop the streams, but the station said they had a right to stream their own radio feed.7
Nelson Millman, the program director for the Blue Jay’s flagship station, doubted MLB had any ground to stand on. “Is it really a broadcast when it’s essentially being done over a phoneline?” Although that comment feels pedantic, it raised the point that the internet was uncharted territory and trying to shoehorn internet radio into the old rules wouldn’t work.
In mid-June the owners met to discuss the issue. Surprisingly, MLB agreed to let teams stream games online for free. Maybe they realized the uselessness of trying to stop it when the horse was already out of the barn. When the first radio broadcast was streamed online, about 300,000 people worldwide had the technical downloads and components to listen. Less than two years later, millions of people had the ability to stream live video from home.
MLB insisted on some rules: Games could stream on either a team’s website or on the website of the team’s flagship radio station. Stations within a team’s radio network could link to the flagship station’s stream, but could not run it on their own website. Significantly, the stream had to include the same commercials and advertising that ran over the radio waves. The idea was that by allowing streaming with strict guidelines, teams could rake in extra ad revenue since the broadcasts could ostensibly reach a bigger audience.
As MLB was putting rules in place for audio streaming, the horse was running further afield. Progressive Networks demonstrated the first streaming live video of a Major League game at the National Association of Broadcasters annual convention in Las Vegas on April 9, 1997.
100,000 television industry people watched the Mariners take on the Clevelands in a streamed feed from Fox Sports Northwest. Of course, the video itself was small and the images were fuzzy and jerky. But Progressive Networks’ RealVideo had only debuted a few months earlier. If we knew anything about internet products by this point, it’s that they were constantly improving.
In writing about the first internet radio broadcast, or “netcast”, the Tampa Tribune noted:
Cyber-radio could end up being a passing fad or could be a significant new form of communications… as the lines between computers, television, radio and other media are being blurred. Tomorrow's radio and television could be your home computer.8
Though people were excited by the new technology and seemed to grasp that this could change the way we consumed media, there didn’t seem to be an acknowledgement of the ways this could drastically change fandom.
Suddenly fans who lived in a different part of the country from their favorite team could follow the games more closely. Sure, up to this point, they could read box scores and blurbs in local newspapers. Some teams were easier than others to catch on national television. Live streaming did more than just give fans a way to follow their team from another geographic location; through the team’s broadcasters and the little pieces of a game’s story that are lost in box scores, it gave fans a real connection to their team.
*****
The Mariners, and baseball, went into the online revolution with the goal of making baseball more accessible for fans. It worked the other way around too; MLB suddenly had more access to its fans, whether they wanted that or not.
The Mariners launched their website in November 1994. And in their excitement, they talked about possibly adding email addresses for players to the site so fans could contact their favorite player directly. They were likely disabused of that idea pretty quickly. You’ll remember that November 1994 was smack dab in the middle of the players strike.
Because the website offered easy ways for fans to get in touch with the team, fans took advantage of it. Garth Brown, president of Semaphore Corp, which put together the Mariners’ website, put a positive spin on it, saying that the electronic messages from fans were great because
it gives the Mariners a chance to respond to those fans and let them know what’s going on….The whole Internet experiment is a way that they can reach out to fans all over the world and say, ‘We still care about you, and we're working to make sure that baseball is still here for you.’9
Of course, before widespread internet usage, you could still contact your favorite team and give them a piece of your mind. You could call them. You could write them a letter. You could write a letter to the Sports Editor of your favorite newspaper to express your feelings about them. You could call your local sports radio station and scream about them. But all those things took much more effort than firing off an email or filling out a contact form.
The internet opened up ways of sports fanning that hadn’t been available before. Geoff Reiss, a publisher for ESPN’s website, was forthcoming about their goal to reinvent sports coverage into something more in line with what fans wanted:
"Fans want to be experts; they want to tell you everything you want to know... But I don't know how much the traditional sports media really answers the basic questions the fans have about the way things work and what's behind that. The traditional sports media has more and more worked as a relatively detached filter of information."10
A number of things online gave fans the opportunity to shape their consumption of sports. ESPN’s website was a big driver of that. There were also internet bulletin boards, newsgroups, and chat rooms where fans could interact with each other and share news.
Fans talking to other fans wasn’t new though; we looked at an Mariners email list from the mid-1990s in Part 1, and various bulletin boards and chat rooms go back even further. The first recognized chat room was part of the University of Illinois’s computer network in 1973.
The company that became America Online was founded in 1983, and chat rooms of a sort existed as far back as 1986. In 1991, AOL launched a product for DOS (the operating system for IBM computers) and in 1992, a product for Windows. AOL began a marketing campaign in which they distributed as many copies as possible of floppy disks that gave users a free trial. As people tried out the service, and later subscribed, the chat rooms grew in popularity.
My earliest memories of using the internet were gathering with a group of friends around the computer of whoever had AOL and going into chat rooms and making up “person” to be while we talked to people. Were we talking to boys who were 14 like us, or with 45-year-old men? Who can say! But we had a lot of fun.
Most chats were benign, but things happened occasionally. In 1993, for example, a post on a CompuServe bulletin board prompted a police investigation of a teenage girl in Medina when she made a death threat against Cal Ripken when the Orioles were in town. I wrote about that last year and you can read more about it here:
AOL had the most popular chat rooms, but other sites offered them once the World Wide Web was up and running. I was a fan of the baseball room on Yahoo, personally. There’s not much to be said about the Mariners chatter in these because they simply don’t exist anymore. Luckily the same cannot be true of a newsgroup that lives in Mariners lore.
Usenet is a bulletin board of sorts that is hugely significant in the rise of internet culture. It was first developed in 1979 and became publicly available in 1980. Usenet was organized into different newsgroups and participants could find a newsgroup that aligned with their interest and post away.
The first Mariners newsgroup appeared in March 1994. The first year there are sporadic posts, which began to pick up significantly during the 1995 playoff run. The newsgroup is still available online, archived by Google at https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners. Some posts seem to have disappeared and the formatting can be tricky, but it is a treasure trove of fan opinion.
Although there were fewer posters than on Twitter, anyone who’s had the Mariners Twitter experience will feel right at home scrolling through the posts. Among the typical discussions about batting order and bullpen usage, and complaints about announcers and calls to fire Lou Piniella, were some real delights.
A common trope among Mariners fans is that other Mariners fans don’t know anything about baseball or their team. Case in point, a commenter less than a month after the newsgroup began in 1994 posting:
This might offend some people, but please take it in the spirit of cooperation that it is intended: People in this newsgroup are the most IGNORANT bunch of fans I have ever listened to (semi :-) You people seem to have no clue what is happening with "your" team. I kind of understand, given that I am a transplanted Twins fan here in the greater Seattle area, but still.11
There were also some very wholesome posts like this one from 1994:
I am a big fan of the mariners, formerly from Seattle, I just wanted to let you know that the Mariners are the best and that Ke(n) Griffey Jr. kicks butt. Thank you.12
Ken Griffey Jr. kicks butt. There can be no more essential mid-90s kid statement than that. Kicks butt. (That’s a good thing, if you’re unfamiliar with youth speak of the time).
Also from 1994, a classic prank from the early internet days:
Mariners suck The Yanks are the only team to root for in the American League -- if there is one.
It was followed by a replay that read:
I apologize to all mariner fans. Some friends were fooling around on my computer and posted this message. I hope no one was offended.13
I’m still paranoid about leaving my phone unattended because I don’t want any unauthorized posting done in my name! This was the real purpose of phone passcodes and we all know it.
Another essential part of Mariners fandom is threatening to stop being a Mariners fan. In July 1995, a poster was fed up with the Mariners doing the up-down-up-down to AAA and back with Alex Rodriguez and posted:
If they send Alex Rodriguez down to Tacoma ever again, my days as a Mariners fan are over.14
Might want to hang in there a couple more months, bud. (And we all know you’ll never quit this team.)
Amusing posts aside, part of the reason the Usenet group goes down in Mariners history is because two Mariners fans, who would later play a big part in the sabermetric revolution, were prominent posters in the group. Derek Zumsteg and Dave Cameron were in college and high school respectively when they began posting.
Zumsteg was posting since 1995. In response to a fan who suggested the Mariners “let Bone go and keep Blowers and Benes”, he replied:
I think the Mariners should release Buhner and give all the money (to you) to buy crack so you can come up with even stupider ideas.15
Perfect internet response. No notes.
Dave Cameron was exactly what you’d expect as a Usenet poster. In June 1998, when he would have been finishing his junior year of high school, he defended the much maligned Russ Davis in a post titled "Russ Davis: The most underrated Mariner?”
You know it sounds crazy as bad as he has played this year, but it may just be true. People in this city consider him to be a AA player and want to replace him with Charles Gipson. They are saying trade him for anything you can get, send him down, etc... Believe it or not, Russ Davis is an average 3rd baseman in the AL right now. Why? Because his competition stinks! Below is a list of OPS' for the current group of AL 3Bman.
(list of OPS of third basemen in the league)
In 1998, Davis ranks 7th. Career, Davis ranks 9th (due to Ripken/Boggs/Hollins primes, which were long ago). 3 year, Davis ranks 9th (due to pathetic injury riddled 96).
Russ Davis is in the middle of a humungous slump (OPS by month: .820, .812, .506) which he will eventually break out of pushing his OPS back to its normal .800 level. Thats about what Russ Davis is: A bad defensive 3rd baseman with an .800 OPS. However, his defense is not THIS bad. Piniella is getting to his head and messing him up. He didnt have trouble fielding in the minors. Once Lou is gone, I bet he
improves.Now, this is why I say Davis is UNDERRATED. From that list of the 14 starting AL 3Bman, which would you rather have than Russ Davis? I would rather have Brosius, Ventura, and Palmer for sure. I would probably rather have Valentin (of course, I would then make him a 2Bman). Maybe Fernando Tatis, cause he has some potential. Thats about it. Ripken, Boggs, Hollins, Blowers, and Fryman are all past
their primes and declining. Sprague, Coomer, and Randa all never had primes.So of all the 3Bman in the AL, Davis is probably somewhere between 5th-9th. Which is average. He will get better, and he is not our problem.16
The Usenet group picked up posters throughout the ‘90s. It was the most active in the early 2000s, then slowly petered out. Some of this was due to Cameron and Zumsteg starting their USS Mariners blog in 2002. Lookout Landing (née Leone for Third) followed in 2005. The blogs added robust comment systems and newsgroup posters became blog commenters.
Ah, but the blogging era is a future installment. For now, I leave you with this utterly unhinged take from early September 1995, as the Mariners were really beginning their playoff run. Widespread internet access may have been new, and the internet has certainly changed a lot in the years that followed. But the people on the internet? Turns out, they’ve always been this way.
Griffey was hitting .234 as of Sunday. Yet stupid Lou insists on batting him third! Griffey is not himself and until he is, Lou should bat him 8th or 9th, because his BA is lower than anyone else by far except Fermin. And Lou should bring Amaral back into the game. He's a good fielder and a good contact hitter. Of course, that would mean dumping either Vince, Ken, or Buhner. Maybe Griffey should be sent down to the minors for a while until his performance comes around, and let Amaral, who's having a good year help the M's actually win. Griffey's fielding has also been sub-standard.17
Never change, Mariners posters. Never change.
https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/august-5-1921-kdkas-harold-arlin-broadcasts-first-baseball-game-over-commercial-radio-as-pirates-rally-to-beat-phillies/
https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2008/03/10/SBJ-In-Depth/Two-Years-That-Set-The-Stage-For-Sports-Online.aspx
"M'S GOING WORLDWIDE ON INTERNET." Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 31, 1995: A1.
https://restream.io/blog/history-of-live-streaming/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-07-sp-149-story.html
ALEXANDER, RACHEL. "NBA, ESPN TEAM UP TO PUT GAMES ON-LINE." Sun-Sentinel, December 10, 1995: 13C.
, . "BASEBALL SEEKS SOLUTION FOR ITS WEB BROADCASTS." Press of Atlantic City, Rubin, Josh. "Baseball strikes out over web broadcasts." Toronto Star, The (Ontario, Canada), April 30, 1997: D3.
RUIZ, FRANK. "Radio's newest waveWith the click of a mouse, through a computer's speakers, listeners can tune into radio via the Internet.." The Tampa Tribune, September 11, 1995: 8.
Bruscas, Angelo. "IN LINE FOR ON LINE - CORNUCOPIA OF SPORTS EVOLVING ON INTERNET." Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 1, 1995: D1.
https://www.wired.com/1997/06/sportszone/
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners/c/P8pjUfhw1fY
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners/c/8vmr0vTiTIA
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners/c/pm5UpeM9Lbg
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners/c/WNPFtJESD5A
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners/c/687MYozqQWo/m/OfZbVs1PzCgJ
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners/c/Y8Qmsj1OJow/m/JADvW1gEZzAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners/c/o-Ep0dIYaPg/m/n3iVjCH-TCAJ
Salute to M's fans who made their modems squeal just to critique guys like Russ Davis and Brian Turang.
Never change Mariner posters ❤️
This was such a delight to read.