KTWN: Can Music and Baseball Mix?

In the months since KTWN (96.3 FM) made headlines by taking over the Minnesota Twins' radio broadcasts, much has been made of the station's having a poor signal, the lack of a consistent format, and the fact that both the team and the station are owned by the Pohlad family.  They've never made a bad investment, have they?

Having changed from hip hop (as B96) to pop hits (as 96.3 Now) to its current Hot Adult Contemporary in only a couple of years, people have a right to be skeptical.  KTWN's tagline is "Radio For Us.  Community, Sports and Music", which makes them sound like a small town radio station, or recalling the glory days of WCCO-AM in the 1960s and 70s.

Instead of Boone & Erickson, Howard Viken and Steve Cannon, you're getting "Cain and Company" .  That's a DJ named Cain bantering with Rena Sargianopolous and Eric Perkins of KARE (Channel 11) in morning drive.  The other high-profile hire KTWN made is getting Brian (B.T.) Turner to move over from KTCZ (Cities 97).

To hedge their bets, KTWN has added former Twin Ron Coomer and former KSTP (Channel 5) sports guy Rod Simons to its baseball coverage before and after the games, and in-between the music.

With the addition of baseball, KTWN is swimming against the tide by being one of the few flagship stations in Major League Baseball not to have a news, talk or sports format.  By sticking to music, KTWN risks alienating the few listeners they already have.  Music and sports audiences have been known to be mutually exclusive.

Granted, the sound quality on Twins games have improved greatly with the move to FM, after all the complaints about not being able to hear games on previous flagship KSTP (1500 AM).  Having said that, there's still parts of the Twin Cities that aren't able to pick up 96.3.

(If you go on twinsbaseball.com, you can see a map of radio affiliates for the Twins baseball network that covers the Upper Midwest.  What you won't get are the call letters to those stations, just the frequencies.  Someone on the Twins staff must have been too lazy to do the research.)

Most radio observers see KTWN, a station with a low-rated music format broadcasting games of a last-place baseball team, as a disaster waiting to happen.  It's not too late to change to a format that's more compatible with baseball.  The NBC Sports Radio network, which just started on the air, is still available now that CBS Sports Radio has been taken by the three stations at 105 FM.  Or the Pohlads can make some sort of deal to let Hubbard Broadcasting simulcast 1500 ESPN on FM.  It couldn't be any worse than what they've got now.

It'll be an interesting experiment, to say the least.  KTWN is gambling that the same folks who like Pink, Mumford and Sons, and the rest of the artists they play are also baseball fans, and vice versa.  If they don't, they'll have as much trouble as the Twins in getting out of the ratings cellar.