Yankees’ fans finding ally in King

We have arrived. Eastern Maine in general and Bangor in particular are officially a two-major league baseball team market.

Move over Chicago. Make room New York, LA, and the San Francisco Bay area. T2-R9 is comin’ through.

Mainers in places like Belfast, Lincoln, Dexter and most points in between have for decades been able to punch one pre-set button on their radio dials and receive the traditional broadcast of the Boston Red Sox. It’s an ingrained reaction bred through four generations. Sit on the front porch. Hit the button. Watch the street grow dark. Cuss the Boston manager.

Mainers and Red Sox radio, as intermingled as clams and chowder.

As of this week, baseball lovers within 50 miles or so of Bangor can punch another button and receive a second team over the airwaves. We’ll write it slowly so as not to startle you. The New … York … Yankees.

This novel opportunity to channel surf while driving is provided by WZON radio, AM 620, which is adopting a mostly sports format now that self-proclaimed baseball enthusiast and horror author Stephen King of Bangor owns the station again. Since WABI (AM 91) already had the Red Sox contract in Bangor, WZON had to look elsewhere for a team to fill the summer airwaves. Where else but the Bronx?

Who else but Stephen King could imagine the coupling? The East River meets East Holden… Central Park meets Cascade Park… Times Square meets just plain square.

“It’s not that unusual,” said Bob Bucci of WABC radio in New York, head of the 20-station Yankee radio network that blankets much of the northeast. “We’ve got a couple of stations in Vermont and one in Western Massachusetts. Then again, as far as I know it’s the first time a station in Maine has taken us.”

Upon first reflection, this whole idea undoubtedly makes little sense to the Maine Red Sox coalition, the undisputed majority in state baseball fandom, and a group that tends to like the Yankees and their fans about as much as they like tourists who complain about “all the bugs in Maine.” (Both groups are suffered, if only for the pleasure of watching one beaten and the other eaten).

But for those Sox fans open-minded enough to listen to the Yankee broadcast team of John Sterling and Michael Kay the past couple of nights as the pinstripes took on the Red Sox in Boston, discoveries awaited.

The initial discovery was that there actually is a broadcast tandem as boring to the ear as the current Boston duet of dullness offered by Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano. Switch back and forth between the two stations and, in a very few minutes, the voices of all except Castiglione are indistinguishable from each other. This should in no way be taken as a compliment to Castiglione, who sounds like your uncle doing a bad Vin Scully impression.

Vanilla delivery aside, Kay and Sterling did offer a fresh perspective on the Red Sox that included a couple of nuggets pretty much overlooked by the Boston broadcasters and media.

For instance, during Tuesday’s broadcast, Kay pointed out that one reason Boston pitcher Frank Viola had struggled earlier this season was because he was inadvertently tipping off hitters whenever he would throw a changeup by “flexing the fingers of his glove.” Accounts in the Boston media had mentioned Viola tipping off hitters, but few, if any, mentioned how he was tipping them off.

Kay and Sterling also discussed Fenway’s small seating capacity. They pointed out that Boston management had explored putting a deck of stands over the left field wall but found after conducting stress tests on the street behind the Green Monster that the ground could not support the structure. That’s in-depth knowledge for a couple of New Yorkers.

Bucci points out the real boon for Sox fans will come when the Yanks move on to other opponents, particularly in the A.L. East in this, the season of the four-way race.

“You’ll be able to keep tabs on four teams instead of two,” Bucci said.

Meanwhile, Dale Duff, head of sports programming at WZON, reports the Yankee broadcasts have succeeded in “bringing all the Yankee fans around here out of the woodwork.

“There are a lot more than I realized,” Duff noted.

To which Red Sox fans can only reply, let the bugs have ’em.