Recent news items indicate big changes are coming for the traditional form of broadcasting baseball games in Japan and the end of the line for baseball -- and other sports -- on Armed Forces Network radio in our world of high-tech, satellite and cable communications.

According to the Nikkan Sports paper of July 8, Tokyo's Fuji-TV and its network affiliates will next month discontinue terrestrial telecasts of Yomiuri Giants road games. To watch the games live in the future, viewers will need a cable or satellite system that includes the channels Fuji 739 and Fuji 721.

It is expected other stations and networks will eventually follow the trend and air games of the Giants and other teams on pay TV only.

Meanwhile, the American Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, according to an Associated Press item that appeared in The Japan Times' Sports Briefs section also on July 8, has announced it will no longer broadcast live sporting events on radio around the world, ending more than 60 years of play-by-play coverage.

For years, all Tokyo Giants home games were televised throughout Japan by the Yomiuri-affiliated NTV, channel 4 in Tokyo, and its partner stations in other cities. The road games were handled by the other networks: TBS, Fuji, TV Asahi and NHK.

You could expect to watch a Giants game every night, home or away, on conventional TV, which is all we had until 1989. The various stations scrambled to get the rights to show the games of the then-super popular Tokyo ball club, especially during its heyday and "V-9" era from 1965-73, and the years following when Shigeo "Mr. Giants" Nagashima was the team manager.

Airing the Giants night games in prime or "golden" time made lots of yen for the broadcasters who could easily sell commercial time when sponsors knew families were at home "having dinner with the Giants." Viewer ratings were high, even though most games were picked up an hour into the action and sometimes cut off at inopportune moments because the TV time had "run out."

In recent years, however, those terrestrial rights to some of the Giants home contests went to NHK, TV Asahi and even TV Tokyo after the inauguration of G+, a cable channel of NTV which shows all Giants home contests, regardless of which overland station is televising on a given night.

Now, you can get all six Japan pro baseball games played any day or night, through such outlets as NHK BS-1, Sky-A, Sports-I ESPN, Gaora, J Sports 1, 2 and 3, NTV's G+, TBS' News Bird 258, Fuji's 721 and 739 and BS-Asahi. The days of watching baseball on conventional TV for free may become a thing of the past in the not-too-distance future.

Fuji's decision is said to be based on low viewer ratings, now in single figures compared with numbers in the 20-25 percent range when the Giants were hot, which now they are not. Yomiuri's recent tailspin of disaster has also obviously played a major role in Fuji-TV's thinking.

In Sapporo last week, after Yomiuri suffered consecutive losses to the Yokohama BayStars, an NTV staffer asked if I had ever seen the team play this bad. I had to tell him, "I don't think I've ever seen any team play this bad." The Giants had just lost for the 27th time in 31 games and were in their third losing streak of eight games or more in the past five weeks.

The Kyojin faithful fans, tired of seeing their guys go down to defeat night after night, are apparently not turning on the TV, for fear of more bad news.

So, the changes in the way we watch televised baseball in this country will continue and may be accelerated. Start saving your money if you want to watch the action on the tube; you'll have to be a subscriber.

The good news is that, if you're paying, you can watch the games from first pitch until the final out, rather than hearing the announcer apologize for going off the air with bases loaded, two outs and the scored tied in the ninth inning.

As for the AFRTS decision, this is not surprising. There was a time when few American military troops around the world had access to television, and live radio accounts of sports were extremely popular, including here in Japan over the then-Far East Network (FEN).

An old New York disc jockey on WMCA, Jack Spector, said he recalled Oct. 3, 1951. He was in the service in Japan during the Korean War, doing K.P. and peeling potatoes when he heard legendary New York Giants announcer Russ Hodges call Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round The World" home run to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers and put New York in the World Series.

In the service myself 37 years ago, I relied on FEN, 1550 on your dial, Itazuke, to deliver the play-by-play of the 1969 World Series between the miracle New York Mets and the Baltimore Orioles. I had to stay up all night to hear it though, because the Fall Classic was played in the daytime then. At 1 p.m. in New York or Maryland, it was 2 a.m. at my post in Fukuoka.

I'll also never forget hearing on FEN Tokyo the sixth game of the 1986 World Series between the Mets and Boston and Bill Buckner's infamous flub of Mookie Wilson's grounder, and Kirk Gibson's dramatic "sayonara" homer off Dennis Eckersley in Game 1 of the 1988 Series to give the L.A. Dodgers a come-from-behind win over Oakland.

Nowadays, nearly every U.S. military person stationed anywhere has access to TV and satellite coverage, so there is really no need for radio play-by-play of sports events. In Japan, AFN and Tokyo's Eagle-810 radio have not carried AFRTS' play-by-play of regular season games for years, anyway.

NHK BS-1 and SKY PerfecTV! schedule live major league games almost every day and NHK beams live the World Series and MLB All-Star Game, the NFL Super Bowl and NBA Finals, so we're not missing anything.

Thanks, though, to AFRTS for the years of radio coverage, especially to two longtime anchors of the broadcasts, Dallas Burnette and Ken Allan.

Contact Wayne Graczyk at: [email protected]