The Main Events
- August 5, 1921 – The Phils lost 8–5 to the Pirates in the first major-league game covered by a play-by-play radio announcer, KDKA’s Harold Arlin, broadcasting from a converted-telephone microphone in a field-level box.
- August 5, 1979 – Pete Rose‘s 2,427th single broke Honus Wagner‘s NL career hits record.
Building Toward the Record
Pete Rose arrived in Philadelphia already one of the most prolific hitters the game had seen, and he made sure the Phillies got their money’s worth fast. Cincinnati let him walk after the 1978 season, and on December 5, 1978, Rose signed a four-year, $3.2 million deal that made him the highest-paid player in baseball at the time. The move to Philadelphia came fresh off two more career landmarks: a National League-record 44-game hitting streak that summer, which ended August 1, 1978, and, weeks before that, his 3,000th career hit — a single off Montreal’s Steve Rogers on May 5, 1978, that made him just the 13th player in history to reach the milestone.
By early August 1979, in his first season at first base for Philadelphia, Rose was hitting .331 with a league-best .418 on-base percentage, and he’d crept to the edge of another record: Honus Wagner’s National League mark of 2,426 career singles.
The Game at Three Rivers Stadium
The moment came on Sunday, August 5, 1979, in the opener of a doubleheader against the Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. The Phillies erupted for six runs in the top of the fifth inning, and that frame produced two of the game’s signature swings: a grand slam from Greg Luzinski and, moments later, a clean single off Rose’s bat — his 2,427th career single, pushing him past Wagner atop the NL list. The outburst gave Philadelphia an 8-6 lead.
Pittsburgh wasn’t finished. The Pirates scratched back with single runs here and there before loading the bases in the ninth against Tug McGraw, and John Milner delivered his own grand slam to cap a four-run rally and steal a 12-8 win. Kent Tekulve picked up the win in relief for Pittsburgh; Rawly Eastwick took the loss for the Phillies. Rose’s record-breaking single got buried a little in the final score, but it stood on its own as a milestone in a game that also happened to feature two grand slams in one afternoon.
More Hits, More History
The Wagner record was one stop on a career full of them. Rose picked up his 2,000th career hit on June 19, 1973, a single at Candlestick Park against San Francisco. He reached 3,000 in 1978, as noted above, and kept going long enough to collect his 4,000th hit on April 13, 1984, while playing for the Montreal Expos, who had signed him that January.
Traded back to Cincinnati that August as player-manager, Rose pursued the last and biggest number on the board: Ty Cobb‘s all-time hits record. He passed it on September 11, 1985, lining a single off San Diego’s Eric Show for career hit number 4,192 at Riverfront Stadium, with his teenage son waiting for him near first base. Rose played on through the 1986 season and finished with 4,256 hits, still the most in major-league history. Long before that final number, though, it was a quieter afternoon in Pittsburgh — a six-run fifth inning, a Luzinski slam, and a single off Rose’s bat — that pushed him past one of the National League’s oldest hitting records.
KDKA’s 1921 Broadcast Turned a Baseball Game Into the Birth of Sports Radio
On August 5, 1921, a 25-year-old Westinghouse engineer named Harold Arlin sat in a box seat at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field and did something no one had done before: he described a major-league baseball game, live, over the radio. Arlin had been hired as a part-time announcer for KDKA, which had gone on the air less than a year earlier and held the distinction of being the country’s first commercially licensed radio station. For the Pirates-Phillies game, he worked with a converted telephone mouthpiece the crew nicknamed the “mushophone” — essentially a tomato can lined with felt — propped on a makeshift desk built from a wood plank.
KDKA’s setup in 1921 was primitive even by the era’s standards. The station had launched in November 1920 broadcasting election returns from a shack on top of a Westinghouse building in East Pittsburgh, using early vacuum-tube transmitter technology. For the ballgame, Westinghouse engineers ran a line from Forbes Field back to the transmitter, sending Arlin’s call out over the air to the small but growing number of listeners who owned receivers or gathered around a neighbor’s crystal set. The Pirates won the game 8-5, a scoreline that mattered far less than the fact that anyone, anywhere within range of the signal, could follow the game without a newspaper or a seat in the stands.
A Muted Reaction, Followed by More Firsts
The broadcast didn’t land as a sensation. Arlin himself later admitted the whole thing felt like an experiment, and even his KDKA colleagues doubted sports on the radio would catch on. Newspapers, still unsure what to call this new medium, referred to it as the “radiophone” or “wireless telephone” and mostly looked past it. But Arlin didn’t slow down. He called a tennis match the very next day, August 6, 1921, then a football game between Pitt and West Virginia on October 8, 1921, and eventually a boxing match in 1923 — stacking up sports-broadcasting firsts in rapid succession.
That August afternoon gave baseball a significant lead over the other major American sports leagues. Hockey came next, with Toronto station CFCA airing an NHL game between the Toronto St. Pats and Ottawa Senators on February 14, 1923 — about a year and a half after Arlin’s baseball broadcast. Professional football lagged much further behind. While a college football game had aired on radio in 1921, the first broadcast of a professional football game didn’t arrive until November 29, 1934, when NBC carried a Thanksgiving Day matchup between the Chicago Bears and Detroit Lions nationally. Basketball trailed furthest of all, simply because there was no NBA yet to broadcast — the league’s predecessor, the Basketball Association of America, didn’t play its first game until November 1946, with broadcaster Marty Glickman calling New York Knicks games on radio almost from the league’s inception. By the time professional basketball had its first radio voice, baseball’s broadcasting history already stretched back a quarter century.
Philadelphia Baseball Events for August 5
- August 5, 1927 – Cy Williams hit for the cycle to help the Phils beat Pittsburgh, 9–7.
- August 5, 1945 – Signed minor-league free agent Steve Ridzik, who pitched 12 seasons in the majors.
- August 5, 1975 – The first eight Phillies batters reached base safely against the Cubs’ Bill Bonham, fueling a 13–5 win with a 10-run first inning that included home runs from Garry Maddox and Mike Schmidt.
- August 5, 1975 – Traded Dave Schneck to Cincinnati for John Vukovich.
- August 5, 1977 – Signed minor-league free agent Bob Dernier.
- August 5, 1987 – Amid a 13–3 loss to the Mets, outfielder Glenn Wilson pitched a hitless, walkless ninth inning with a strikeout — the best pitching of the day.
- August 5, 2000 – Traded Mickey Morandini to Toronto for a player to be named later.
- August 5, 2005 – Bob Boone was enshrined on the Phillies Wall of Fame.
- August 5, 2014 – Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, and Jimmy Rollins made their 887th start together on the Phillies infield, passing the Dodgers’ Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell trio for most games started by an infield combo.
Philadelphia Baseball Birthdays for August 5
- Hal Irelan (born 1890) – Second baseman whose entire major-league career was a single 1914 season with the Phillies, hitting .236 in 67 games.
- Rick Bosetti (born 1953) – Outfielder who broke into the majors with the Phillies as a September call-up in 1976 and hit .278 in 13 games before later playing for the Cardinals, Blue Jays, and Athletics.
- Andrew Bellatti (born 1991) – Relief pitcher who appeared in 27 games for the Phillies in 2023, posting a 5.11 ERA with 25 strikeouts in 24⅔ innings.
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