Courtesy the Boston Globe

(July 23, 2010) Maybe it’s appropriate, given the constant changes on the fly to the battered but resilient Red Sox lineup, that the ball club’s flagship radio station would also find itself making key alterations in the midst of a summer of tough competition.

If you tuned in to the pregame show on WEEI Monday, an hour before the first pitch of the game at Oakland, you were greeted by a different format than the typical feature-and-interview-oriented program that most major league baseball radio broadcasts utilize, including the Red Sox for so many years.

Instead, and with minimal advance notice from the station, the pregame show had suddenly become something of an extension of WEEI’s daytime programming, with studio host John Ryder taking calls from fans.

It has not been a subtle transition, particularly if you get your fill of some of WEEI’s recurring and occasionally informed “celebrity’’ callers during the day. But according to Jason Wolfe, the vice president of programming and operations for Entercom New England, WEEI’s parent company, it was a well-considered one.

“I’ve wanted to make the show more interactive for a while now,’’ Wolfe said. “Most every pregame show that you listen to is pretty much the same. You’ll have an interview, a commercial, an interview, a commercial. Being live gives that show a different feel. And frankly, one that we think is more consistent with our daily programming lineup. It gives the audience a chance to chime in on the Red Sox right up until the start of the game. That was really the main reason we modified it.’’

Wolfe said that before making the switch, sponsors were informed and reassured that if they had bought advertising time during a particular segment, such as the daily interview with manager Terry Francona or the minor league report, those segments would continue to run, just in the flow of the show rather than as stand-alone items.

“We’ve been talking about it for a while,’’ said Wolfe. “There was some fine-tuning that had to go into the process just as far as fixing up the format, notifying the affiliates, and making sure everybody was on the same page. So now we’re rocking and rolling with this for the rest of the year.’’

And beyond. Wolfe is looking at the change as a permanent one rather than as a trial period over the final two-plus months. He also hinted that a similar pregame format is possible on other live game broadcasts carried by the station. WEEI is the radio home of the Celtics.

“We’re committed to it,’’ Wolfe said. “And I would say that as you tune in to the various play-by-play products we have here you’ll probably hear some similar things with different teams. It’s really about trying to do something different and giving people a chance to participate in shows they otherwise might not be able to participate in, in addition to the fact that the audience gets to have a little bit more of a connection to our announcers [Dave O’Brien, Joe Castiglione, and Jon Rish] as opposed to listening to a four-minute interview here and a two-minute interview there and a feature and so on. I think in the long run that interaction is going to prove to be very fruitful for us.’’

It should be noted that such interaction has already been fruitful for WEEI’s upstart competition, 98.5 The Sports Hub. While WEEI remains a powerhouse in the Arbitron ratings — it finished second in the crucial and lucrative men 25-54 demographic during the spring ratings period (April 1-June 23) and won the 7 p.m.-midnight time slot — there is no denying that it now faces its first legitimate challenger to sports-talk supremacy in the Boston market.

It won’t celebrate its first anniversary of switching to an all-sports format until mid-August, but the impact of 98.5 The Sports Hub has been remarkable. It was fifth overall among men 25-54 in the spring book.

While certain WEEI hosts refuse to acknowledge that the station no longer has a sports-talk monopoly, there are occasionally subtle clues that the old familiar hubris is now accompanied by humility. There’s now an emphasis on including Boston listeners to 103.7, WEEI’s FM outlet in Providence, in the local ratings, a reasonable point that the station never felt required to reiterate until recently. And the Bruins, long a punchline on WEEI programming save for the midday show — anyone up for another round of “Hockey Talk’’? — are now a serious topic. Wolfe acknowledged that the Bruins’ intriguing, if ultimately disappointing, postseason run was beneficial to the station, despite their games airing on The Sports Hub.

“Our overall numbers for May and June were excellent. So we feel like we took great advantage of the runs from both teams,’’ Wolfe said, referring to the Bruins and Celtics. “I think the fact that the Bruins for a while there looked like they were kind of a shoo-in to the conference finals and the fact that they were going to play Montreal got everybody excited that a presence in the Cup finals might be imminent, that really jazzed it up to a higher level. So I think it was great for us.’’

Coincidentally — or perhaps not — WEEI’s tweaks to the Red Sox pregame show counter what is arguably the greatest success of The Sports Hub. “The Baseball Reporters,’’ hosted by Tony Massarotti from 6-7 p.m. weekdays, beat the Red Sox pregame show on WEEI in most key demos in May and June, an impressive feat considering the program debuted in April.

Wolfe said the success of “The Baseball Reporters’’ was not a factor in the pregame show’s revamping.

“When we went to the hourlong format at the beginning of the year, it came up in discussion then, but we weren’t ready to do it then,’’ he said. “But we knew we had some leeway to play with. It’s been on the forefront of our minds for the last two months, anyway.’’

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