Baseball radio in the Northeast

[Kevin Vahey]

Part owner of the Sox Haywood Sullivan was a golf buddy of Jack Campbell who owned WPLM - simple as that.

PLM had become the FM backup for WITS after WWEL became KISS 108

Now how Dick Richmond got the Sox to move to WMEX from WHDH after the 1975 regular season was the head scratcher. The first night playoff game fans to the west of Boston couldn't hear the games.

Yawkey was angry that new HDH owner Blair had changed the format from MOR to soft Top 40 and Richmond then flipped MEX to MOR.
WMEX offered Jess Cain big money and Blair simply offered Jess a blank check to stay (Jess hated the music too) Alan Dairy did go to WMEX however. 

With the Sox onboard Richmond was then able to sell WMEX at an inflated price to an Ohio group known as Mariner Broadcasting who then changed calls to WITS. Mariner tried to save the Sox by moving the transmitter to Waltham from Quincy which of course was a massive blunder.

WITS went broke and WPLM got the rights.
-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Waters <martinjwaters@yahoo.com>
Sender: boston-radio-interest-bounces@tsornin.BostonRadio.orgDate: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 02:36:49 
To: <paul@derrynh.net>
Cc: <bri@bostonradio.org>
Subject: Re: Baseball radio in the Northeast

--- On Tue, 7/12/11, Paul Hopfgarten wrote:
Not to be picky, but it was 99.1 WPLM (I don't believe the Sox ever flagged 
OR even broadcast on 99.5....though they did do night games only on 107.9 
WWEL in 1978, guess Disco and Sox didn't mix, so they did not continue when 
WXKS (KISS) started in 1979...)  . . . 

    OK,so I was already in Nutmeg Land -- listening to the Red Sox year after year on WTIC (AM),which has carried the games since at least the 1950's --and missed out on all this goofball business with the RedSox looking like they subcontrACTED putting their games on a really bad signal, then switching to a worse signla, then selecting as their "flagship"station an FM not even really in themarket, etc., What the heck was that all about, anyhow? Just another aspect of the increasignly dysfunctional ownership?