Being a sportswriter, I’m often met by friends, family and even complete strangers with one question.

“Did you see the game last night?” they’ll ask.

“No,” I’ll usually reply, “but I heard it.”

Their response is typically a blank stare. Sometimes I can see their brains trying to process why someone, especially a sportswriter, would have listened to the game rather than watched it. This is especially common among inquisitors under 30, none of whom know what life was like for the sports fan before the cable and digital revolution.

Cable and satellite changed what it means to be a sports fan, especially for the sports fan in rural parts of the country like Maine.

Before cable, your baseball, basketball and hockey viewing in Maine was limited to one or maybe two games of the week and whatever Red Sox, Celtics or Bruins games the local stations decided to pick up from WSBK or WLVI out of Boston.

If you were a baseball junkie, you basically got your fix on the weekends. Channel 6 or 13 or whoever had the broadcast rights to the Red Sox would usually only show games on Friday night and Sunday, with an occasional weeknight game mixed in. They would never, ever pre-empt regularly scheduled programming for weekday games. I got the impression from watching “Feedback” all those years on Channel 6 that Lew Colby was afraid that the little old ladies who didn’t get to see their “stories” would march down to the WCSH offices and beat him with their rolling pins.

If you wanted to see somebody besides the Red Sox, the pickings were slim. NBC had a game on Saturday afternoons. ABC had Monday Night Baseball. That was it. The National League might has well have played all its games in Mexico, as far as I was concerned. It was that foreign to me as a fledgling baseball fan.

But then, when I was about 10, I discovered AM radio.

AM radio was cable before cable television. On a given night, I could pick up as many as 14 different baseball radio broadcasts up and down the dial. Besides the Red Sox, I could tune in to the Blue Jays and Expos (english and french broadcasts) out of Canada, the Mets and Yankees out of New York, the Phillies and Pirates out of Pennsylvania, the Cubs out of Illinois (couldn’t get the White Sox for some reason), the Reds and Indians out of Ohio, the Orioles out of Maryland, the Tigers out of Michigan, and occasionally, the Cardinals out of KMOX in St. Louis.

To me, there wasn’t anything better on a hot summer night than to come inside from a few games of wiffle ball, pop open a Coke and turn on the radio to hear Phil Rizzuto, Bob Murphy, Herb Score, Marty Brennaman, Chuck Thompson, Jack Buck, and my two favorites, Harry Kalas and Ernie Harwell, describe what was going on at a ballpark thousands of miles from little ol’ me in Maine.

It wasn’t just baseball. It was a slice of life in another part of the country. Listening to a Phillies game, I could imagine some kid my age sitting on his front stoop in Philadelphia, pounding a baseball into his glove, listening to Harry Kalas call a game-winning home run by “Michael Jack Schmidt.” It made the world a little smaller.

I didn’t just hear great announcers and great games, I heard history. The first time I actually picked up an Indians broadcast (on “3WE” out of Cleveland), I listened to the last two innings of Len Barker’s perfect game against Toronto. I was 11 at the time and didn’t even know what a perfect game was. Four years later, I tuned in to WLW out of Cincinnati to hear Pete Rose break Ty Cobb’s all-time hit record. Those moments sent chills up my spine.

Then we got cable, and suddenly I could catch a Cubs game or a Mets game or watch the Yankees or Braves on one of the superstations, WGN, WOR, WPIX or WTBS. I instantly became a fan of Harry Caray, who did the Cubs broadcast for WGN. On April, May and early June afternoons, the first thing I’d do when I stepped off the school bus was turn on WGN to see if the Cubs were playing.

Most of those superstations are gone from Maine cable systems now. Here in the Lewiston area, only TBS remains. Baseball junkies like me aren’t left in the dark, though, because ESPN still does a ton of games. Heck, those of us who can afford a dish and MLB’s “Extra Innings” package can see any we want with the touch of a button.

But you know, it’s just not the same.

Don’t get me wrong. ESPN’s coverage of the games is top shelf. It’s just that something is lost when you have a generic announcer describing the game as opposed to the local guy who is with the team every day. And even the local guys that you can pick up over the satellite are bland, team-approved house boys afraid to offend the fans or even the players.

There’s also something lost in the translation on television. I used to scoff at radiophiles who testified that listening to baseball on the radio was better than watching it on TV. Now I’m one of them. Even though there aren’t too many radio guys left who could paint a word picture like Ernie Harwell or Vin Scully, listening to a game on the radio is still far more stimulating than watching it on TV.

Sure, I needed to see a Pedro Martinez pitch or a Barry Bonds hit with my own eyes to truly appreciate the artistry of both when they were in their prime.

But day in and day out, over the course of a long season, having the theater of the mind activated by a man at the ballpark, his microphone and a transistor radio beats NESN or ESPN or Fox, no matter how many graphics, camera angles or slow motion replays they have.

So now I find myself returning to the AM dial. Any night I’m on the road, I tune in to a Yankee game here or an Orioles game there or whatever I can pick up without too much static.

Sometimes it takes me back to when I was 10. Usually, though, it’s just baseball on the radio, and that’s good enough for me.

Randy Whitehouse is a staff writer. He can be reached by email at [email protected]