Betty Caywood Bushman, who broke barriers as Kansas City A’s broadcaster, dies at 89
Charlie O. Finley never lacked for ideas.
As the owner of the Kansas City Athletics, he had mechanical a rabbit behind home plate that brought new baseballs for the umpire and had sheep hang out behind the right-field fence at Municipal Stadium.
Finley also hired the first full-time female broadcaster: Betty Bushman Caywood, who died on Sept. 3 in Kansas City. She was 89.
During the 1964 season, Finley hired Betty Bushman to call games for the Kansas City A’s.
“Charlie, I don’t know the first thing about baseball,” she told Finley at the time, per the Society for American Baseball Research.
“He said, ‘I know, but you’ve got the gift of gab, and all you have to do is color.’ And I didn’t even know what color was. But he was right, I did have the gift of gab, and he offered me an amount of money I couldn’t believe.”
The SABR story notes that Caywood had a Master’s degree in speech therapy from Northwestern. The Kansas City Times said she had been a “weather girl on a Chicago radio station.”
Caywood’s hiring wasn’t exactly endorsed by baseball writers. A Times story said she “could not, by all the sacred rules of baseball writers, be given permission to enter the press room where the meals are served but a solicitous attendant not only brought the luncheon to her but brought her a linen napkin in contrast to the paper napkins, which would have sufficed for the writers.”
However Finley didn’t seem intent on having Caywood be a trailblazer. She told the Fountain City Frequency blog in 2018 that Finley would call her in the middle of the night with instructions on what to say the next day.
“When he first hired me, he told me that he wanted me to wear Kelly green and that awful yellow and I said, ‘Your male broadcasters wear that?’” Caywood told the blog. “And he said, ‘Well of course not,’ and I said, ‘Neither does your female one.’ In the beginning I would listen and then hang up politely. Later on I’d just hear his voice and I’d just hang up.
“That being said, he was a perfect gentleman to me except in the middle of the night when he would call, or call in the shows and he would scream and yell and swear and it was just unacceptable behavior which I wouldn’t deal with so I would just hang up.”
Caywood joined A’s announcers Monte Moore and George Bryson late in the 1964 season, and her role was specific.
During broadcasts, the Times reported, she was “to direct whatever comment she makes to the women members of the radio audience.”
Caywood also wasn’t allowed to travel with the team or stay in the same hotel, unlike the male announcers.
“Frankly, we’re doing it to get women interested and get the publicity,” she told KMBZ in 2018. “I knew I was a gimmick.”
Nevertheless, “I really, really loved it.”
Caywood’s stint with the A’s lasted three weeks, and she was not brought back for the 1965 season.
Author John Peterson (“The Kansas City Athletics: A Baseball History, 1954-1967”) said Caywood broke a barrier.
“Now it’s very common to see women in locker rooms after games, in the broadcast booth, on-field interviews,” Peterson told KMBZ. “I think she was a pioneer in the field.”
Caywood agreed.
“I call myself,” she told the Fountain City Frequency, “the first female baseball broadcaster in the history of the world.”
This story was originally published September 16, 2020 at 10:26 AM.
