New York Times: Displaced baseball fans who used to need a pricey cable package or a high-speed Internet connection to follow their favorite teams now only require a hand-held satellite radio, the familiar voice of a hometown broadcaster and a healthy imagination.
“I feel like a kid again,” said Nathan Olson, a Cubs fan from Pine Bluff, Ark. “I haven’t listened to the radio like this since the 80’s.”
Technology has taken fans like Olson from radio to television to the Internet and back again. With XM, a truck driver who grew up outside St. Louis listens to the Cardinals as he makes 600-mile runs. A husband and wife in South Carolina channel surf over dinner between her Orioles and his Indians. And Olson can go to sleep with his headphones on tuned to the Cubs game, just as when he was growing up in an Iowa farm town.
“The reaction was incredibly emotional and incredibly personal,” said David Butler, director of corporate affairs for XM, which paid Major League Baseball $650 million for the right to broadcast games over the next 11 years.
