Baseball on Television: The Formative Years, 1939-51

The influence of television on Major League baseball has been well established. In 1999 Baseball Weekly listed television as the most important change in the game during the twentieth century, second only to Jackie Robinson's breaking the color barrier. (1) Despite this, most histories of the game see television gaining prominence only in the mid-1950s with the rise of CBS's "Game of the Week" broadcast by Dizzy Dean and Bud Blattner (later Pee Wee Reese). In this article we will examine the formative period of televised baseball from before the first one-camera telecast of a college game in May 1939 to the first nationwide broadcast of the 3-game playoff between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951. We will document the extent of coverage during the experimental period from 1939 to 1946, focusing on the evolution of coverage techniques. Beginning in 1947 baseball received extensive coverage by local television stations that, by 1948, extended to every Major League city except Pittsburgh. During the season baseball was a staple of local television at a time when networks provided little programming outside of the evening hours. Non-network stations saw baseball as an opportunity to fill programming hours, whereas network stations viewed baseball programming as a hindrance to network feeds. As networks rose to prominence in the early 1950s, in New York and Chicago baseball coverage shifted from network stations to those with no network affiliation (independents). Coverage was reduced substantially in other cities, which had no independent stations, and baseball was relegated to weekend hours, setting the stage for the rise of the "Game of the Week" and decades of conflict over how television could be used most effectively by Major League Baseball. Some owners reacted to television's perceived negative effect on attendance by reducing the numbe r of games telecast and by discouraging improvements in game coverage. FIRST IMAGES The first image of baseball on television is nestled in what could easily be mistaken for a family album with the word "photographs" etched in gold leaf lettering on the cover. The image is small, fuzzy, and fastened to the album's black construction paper with four self-adhesive corner tabs. (2) Like most fathers, both proud and worried, the man dubbed the "father of televisions" by RCA made photos of his new offspring. Vladimir Zworykin was a scientist who fled post-Bolshevik Russia, bringing his ideas for a new kind of television with him. After some time with General Electric he was hired by another, much more powerful child of Mother Russia, David Sarnoff, chair of the Radio Corporation of America, In the 1930S RCA was the most powerful electronics company in the world--it was to radio what Microsoft is to computers today--and David Sarnoff was his era's Bill Gates, although no one would ever think to refer to NBC's founder as a "radio nerd. " Sarnoff was fond of saying that he didn't get ulcers, he gave them. While working at RCA, Zworykin perfected his iconoscope, the first television camera pickup tube. The pickup tube translates light energy into electrical energy that can be transmitted by coaxial cable or broadcast over radio waves. It was the most important component in a television camera until the 1980s. Zworykin's creation, and its relentless promotion by RCA, is responsible for the inventor's fame as the "father of television," while inventors, such as Philo Farnsworth, who contributed as much if not more to the development of electronic television were virtually ignored. Zworykin even had his own baseball card of sorts: a 1948 Topps Gum Magic Photo card from a series on famous U.S. inventors. (3) Starting in 1933 Zworykin had photos taken of daily activities and special events in his lab in Camden, New Jersey. An eclectic collection, the photos feature televised images of Zworykin and his various assistants as well as shots of the Ben Franklin Bridge and a nearby radio tower from outside their laboratory. …