A Major League baseball game is televised for the first time - August 26th, 1939

On this day in 1939, the first televised professional baseball game was broadcast from an experimental TV station in New York City.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that rounds the basis of history one day at
a time. I'm Gabe Lucier and in this episode we're
talking about in early milestone in TV broadcasting, the first

(00:22):
time that a professional sporting event aired on television. The
day was August twenty sixth, nineteen thirty nine. The first
televised professional baseball game was broadcast from an experimental TV

(00:43):
station in New York City. The game was a doubleheader
between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers, and it
was played at Epits Field in Brooklyn. The Reds won
the first game five to two, but the Dodgers came
back in the second, winning six to one. The big
broadcast took place during the very early days of television,

(01:06):
before there were established networks and regular programming schedules. At
the time, few people had ever seen a television set
in person, and even fewer actually owned one. In fact,
there were only about four hundred TVs in the whole
New York area when the game was broadcast, and many
of them sported tiny five inch screens. The television medium

(01:30):
didn't really catch on in the US until after World
War Two, and it was until the mid nineteen fifties
that owning a TV set became more common. But in
nineteen thirty nine, an exhibit at the New York World's
Fair gave Americans an early look at the new technology.
RCA was showcasing an all electronic, black and white television system,

(01:55):
and the fairs organizers thought that televising and upcoming baseball
game would be the perfect way to stoke the public's interest.
After all, baseball was America's favorite pastime, and up to
that point, the only way to experience a game without
physically attending was to listen in on the radio. TV

(02:15):
offered a whole new level of immersion, and people queued
up by the thousands to see it for themselves. The
filming and broadcast of the Dodgers Reds doubleheader was handled
by a local experimental station called W two XBS, which
later became w NBC TV. It wasn't actually the first

(02:37):
time baseball had been televised by NBC. One year earlier,
the station had broadcast a college game between Princeton and Columbia,
but the video quality had left a lot to be desired.
The game had been filmed with just a single camera
placed about fifty feet from home plate, and the resulting
image was said to be very dark and blurry. The

(02:59):
station made considerable improvements over the following year and was
much better prepared for broadcasting the first professional baseball game
in nineteen thirty nine. This time, they positioned two stationary cameras,
one aimed down the third baseline to record infield throws
to first, and the other high above home plate to

(03:21):
give a wide view of the field. As you might imagine,
it was hard to capture all the action at Ebbitts
Field from just those two angles, and for the game's announcer,
future Baseball Hall of Famer Red Barber, it was equally
tough to call the action. That's because he didn't have
a monitor to see what the cameras were seeing, or

(03:43):
to even know which angle the viewers were currently being
shown at home. Red later recalled the challenge of that
first broadcast, saying, quote, I had to watch to see
which camera's red light was on, then guess its direction.
The stands at Ebbitt's Field were filled with thirty three
thousand people that day, but an additional three thousand fans

(04:05):
tuned in to watch the game at the fair or
in their own homes, some from as far away as
fifty miles. The video coverage they saw was spotty at best,
especially since the early cameras had trouble capturing fast moving
objects like a bat being swung or a ball being thrown,
you know, the key components of baseball. Still, it hardly

(04:28):
mattered whether you could see the ball or distinguish one
player from another. For the first time ever, it was
possible to watch a Major League baseball game without actually
going to the stadium. The novelty alone probably would have
been enough to keep some fans glued to the screen
no matter what, but as the technology steadily improved, there

(04:49):
was more and more reason to tune in. At first,
club owners worried that televising games would lead to empty stadiums.
But when those fears proved unfair, and when the first
advertising checks came in, professional baseball hopped on board the
TV bandwagon and never looked back. Other professional sports leagues

(05:10):
quickly followed suit, and today what was once a promising
novelty is now a multi billion dollar industry. To talk
about a home run, I'm gay, blues, gay, and hopefully
you now know a little more about history today than
you did yesterday. If you'd like to keep up with

(05:33):
the show, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and
Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have any
comments or suggestions, feel free to send them my way
by writing to This Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks
to Kasby Bias for producing the show, and thanks to
you for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow

(05:54):
for another day in history class, just the