Cardinal Fans Won’t Hear Shannon & Rooney During World Series
If the St. Louis Cardinals are fortunate enough to make it to the World Series, and right now with the team down 3 games to none it is not looking good, don’t expect to hear Mike Shannon and John Rooney do the play-by-play on radio. So Cardinal fans will be forced to hear the ESPN Radio broadcasts of the World Series games on their favorite Cardinal Baseball station.
With all due respect to the ESPN guys, they don’t know squat about the St. Louis Cardinals compared to Shannon and Rooney. So why are they doing the broadcasts on the Cardinal Baseball Network?
Simply put, because a contract exists between ESPN and Major League Baseball that makes it mandatory that all radio broadcasts of the World Series must be provided by ESPN, who paid big bucks to make that happen. So now you will know why ESPN will be on AM 1070 KHMO and the rest of the Cardinal Baseball Network stations if the Cardinals get to the World Series.
Now there is one exception to this deal and that is that the flagship stations in each World Series team city are allowed to broadcast the game to their local city listeners. In other words, Mike Shannon and John Rooney will broadcast possible World Series games doing the broadcast on KMOX in St. Louis only.
There is no doubt fans along the networks of the World Series participants will not be pleased to have to listen to another broadcast of their favorite team's game especially in the World Series, but this is another case of money talks. Right now it talks louder than the fans do.