87 years ago today, Major League Baseball made its television debut. On August 26, 1939, the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers played at Ebbets Field in front of approximately 33,000 fans, while their matchup was televised on W2XBS, an experimental NBC station. Only about 3,000 people watched on television.
There are several reasons for that tiny television audience. For starters, television was still a new medium in 1939, with only about 400 television sets in the New York area at the time. The broadcast was also tied to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where television was one of the exhibits and NBC was looking for an opportunity to televise a baseball game. W2XBS had a limited reach: The station sent out its signal from atop the Empire State Building, but it only reached about 50 miles.
If you were one of the lucky few to watch Major League Baseball on television, you didn’t exactly see a classic either. The Dodgers scored two runs in the bottom of the second inning thanks to a passed ball and throwing error, then not much happened until the Reds pushed five runs across in the eighth in an inning that included two errors, a bases-loaded walk and the ever-thrilling sacrifice fly. The real excitement, though, was the technology behind the broadcast rather than the game itself.
Televised baseball has grown up a lot since 1939
It’s safe to say today’s baseball fans have it much easier than fans did in 1939 when it comes to following their favorite teams. With multiple television partners, streaming services and apps for smartphones and tablets, fans can watch virtually every game one way or another. In that initial 1939 broadcast, however, viewers had a much more limited picture of the action.
There were only two cameras set up for the broadcast. One sat on the second deck behind the catcher, capturing the field from above, while the other was placed near the visitors’ dugout and focused on home plate. The primitive setup created problems for commentator Red Barber, too: At one point, he lost contact with the director and had to call the game without knowing which camera shot viewers were watching. Modern broadcasts offer dramatically clearer pictures and screens packed with information, from the score and pitch speed to the launch angle of a home run.
At the time of that first televised MLB game, baseball was firmly established as America’s national pastime, and it quickly became a popular option for live sports viewing. Today, it has fallen far behind football in TV viewership, yet nationally televised games still draw between 2 and 3 million viewers, with the World Series still a ratings darling. That’s a far cry from the roughly 3,000 people who watched that first game back in 1939.