DIALSCAN: MIAMI, JUNE 20, 2009

About now, what I would think is going to be a severe traffic jam is starting to build at the entrances to what is now called LandShark Stadium (after Jimmy Buffett’s brand of beer) at Northwest 199th Street in Miami Gardens. I think it’s fun to wonder what the various Marlin and Yankee fans coming to this evening’s game are listening to as they wait.

Betcha even money that a Mercedes is parking close to the stadium on what has to be a searing asphalt lot. Odds are better that the Mercedes is blaring WKCP-FM 89.7, which comes billed as Classical South Florida. Pure, unadulterated classical music 24-7-365, alas with the aftertaste of the occasional pledge drive—thank God we haven’t been tripped up by one. And so one can listen to the heroic strains of Wagner’s overture to Herzog Wildfang in relative peace. I wonder why they don’t play classical music between innings or at-bats; surely it would lend a certain stateliness to the proceedings. They’ve now moved into The Devil’s Trill by Giuseppe Tardini, a piece that comes billed as—the Announcer’s words now—“devilishly hard to play.” I’ll come back here after I’ve finished the piece.

I don’t know when the gates open at LandShark Stadium (f/k/a Joe Robbie Stadium, Pro Player Stadium, Dolphins Stadium and Dolphin Stadium, soon to be known quite possibly as Minnow on Wheels Stadium). I will bet, though, that there are people who will bring their own radios in and while away the time listening to WLRN-FM 89.3. In six minutes—it’s 4:54PM right now, they’ll be listening to All Things Considered. Some earlycomers are listening to Tavis Smiley interviewing some vaguely familiar –sounding fellow. I just realized—it’s Mike Farrell, still trying to sound relevant twenty-six years after M*A*S*H. He’s extolling his book Of Mule and Man; but which is which? Tavis himself is a pretty cool fellow—he’d probably be cooler than anybody in South Beach. Sadly, to my knowledge, there are no portable HD Radios. If there were, someone could cut in to WLRN’s HD channel. Supposedly it carries classical music, but at the moment, Marketplace Money has come to interrupt the music lover’s reverie.

So let’s walk a little further back in the parking lot. And maybe we come upon a Chevy Suburban, where WINZ-AM 940, a sports radio station, perhaps blares away where a group of guys is tailgating. We draw within earshot just as Dan Moriarty and Lincoln Kennedy of Fox Sports Radio are broadcasting “live and direct” and proud of it from California. They tell me what’s happening at the U.S. Open golf tournament on Long Island. If you’ve been following it, all that has been going on is rain and wind and Tiger Woods pouting through it all. Messrs. Moriarty and Kennedy must be bored, because their guest is a private eye who has started a reality show about cheating spouses, which has virtually nothing to do with sports. Maybe the one of the guys doing the barbecuing has ears like an eagle and goes to change the station. We move along.

You would be very, very surprised, and maybe even a bit perplexed, to find that three of the AM stations have the same call letters: WFTL. They’re all owned by the same company. So let’s say there’s a Saturn L200 in the logjam about a mile away from the stadium spinning the dial. Revealing a wisdom beyond his or her years, the driver bypasses 1400 AM, the ESPN Radio affiliate. He or she goes nearly all the way back to the left to 640 AM –it used to be called WMEN, giving a big tip as to its shtick. Not much going on there, either. In the middle of the dial, at 850 AM, the driver finds former WABC talker Steve Malzberg, who (s)he loved to listen to on the way home from Yankee Stadium. And the driver begins to feel ever so slightly nostalgic, even a little more secure in the knowledge that when (s)he eats that overpriced hot dog, (s)he’ll be a little bit better informed than the guy in the next seat. Little by little, the driver’s anger at not being able to hear Sterling and Waldman describe the game on 640 dissipates.

By the way, his or her seatmate may be in the beat-up Ford LTD listening to WQAM-AM 560, waiting for the next perceived inanity to come out of the host’s mouth so he can press the already worn-out “talk” button on his prepaid cell phone and find another useful way to spend his precious cell minutes. We don’t want to be in his field of gravity one second longer than absolutely necessary.

Just now starting his car in the downtown area possibly, an older man and his wife have WIOD-AM 610 permanently locked in, to a point where there’s quite possibly a padlock on the dial. And as they open the Cadillac Seville humpback up to about thirty-seven miles an hour tops, they are entertained by the 5:30 traffic update, and wonder why the reporter has nothing to say about the route they are taking. Granny groans at the weatherman’s announcement that record heat is gripping South Florida and bemoans the fact that they couldn’t get tickets under the overhang. Both of them roll their eyes in disgust hearing about the man who shook his baby because he was aggravated at the baby’s crying. The old man pushes his green Titelist cap down just a little bit further has they turn into the late afternoon sun and Mike McConnell resumes after the newsbreak. Just as I turn my attention elsewhere, the old man’s wife wonders why Tiger Woods pouts so darn much.

Quite possibly the coolest cats in this traffic jam are the ones in the Lincoln Navigator with the tinted windows, listening to WDNA-FM 88.9. They don’t care who wins or loses; all they care about is that there’s a baseball game to go to, and they’re going to squeeze every ounce of happiness and enjoyment that they can out of it. You may have seen someone like that on the highways in your town. A peace symbol on the rear window and the bumper sticker that tells you to “Coexist.” These are the coolest, happiest, most spiritual, most happening dudes you’ll meet. They’re as cool as Miami is hot. They know that besides baseball and classical music, nothing soothes the soul and lifts the spirit quite like…jazz.

Cool.