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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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The enduring relationship between television and professional sports in America began on August 26, 1939, when RCA’s experimental television station W2XBS broadcast the first televised Major League Baseball games – a doubleheader between the Cincinnati Reds and the Dodgers at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field.

However, the Reds-at-Dodgers games were not the very first sports event broadcast on American television.  That distinction goes to a college baseball game between the Columbia Lions and the Princeton Tigers on May 17, 1939.

Shortly after the unveiling of television service at the New York World’s Fair (Countdown #94, Now We Add Sight to Sound), RCA showed their new-fangled medium to Bob Harron, the sports information director at Columbia University, who posed the obvious question:  “Did you ever think of doing a sporting event?”  

About two weeks later, RCA set up cameras at Columbia’s Baker Field to broadcast the second half of a Columbia-Princeton doubleheader with sportscaster Bill Stern calling the action. The telecast received considerable media coverage, including stories in the New York Times and Life Magazine reporting on Columbia’s 2-1 loss to Princeton in a 10-inning game.

Satisfied with the results of the Columbia experiment, RCA and NBC pitched the Brooklyn Dodgers about televising home games from Ebbets Field.

The double header between the Reds and the Dodgers was transmitted on RCA’s experimental station W2XBS from an antenna atop Manhattan’s Empire State Building.  Anyone within a roughly fifty-mile radius could watch the games, provided they were among the few hundred people fortunate enough to own – or have a neighbor who owned – a TV.

The games were covered by two cameras. One was fixed on the upper deck behind the batter’s box, providing a view of the entire field.  The other was stationed behind the visiting team’s dugout along the first-base line covering the action around home plate.  Once a ball was in play, the feed switched from the close up of the plate to the wide angle from the upper deck. 

Those video images were supplied by RCA’s temperamental Iconoscope.  Bright, sunlit portions of the field contrasted with creeping afternoon shadows, which video engineers struggled to balance.  Still, viewers could see the batters swing, the fielders in motion, and even an occasional if fuzzy glimpse of the ball itself. 

The box score for the historic first game reads like a comedy of errors – most of them performed on the field by the Brooklyn Dodgers:  walked-in runs, dropped flies, wild pitches, and passed balls at the plate.  The final score was Cincinnati 5, Dodgers 2.  

The Dodgers recovered in the second game, outscoring the Reds 6-1 to split the doubleheader. 

Play-by-play commentary was provided by Red Barber, already a well-known voice in radio who brought his legendary Southern drawl to the new medium.  Between the two games of the doubleheader, Barber kept the broadcast going with interviews in the stands and the press box.

There was no instant replay or fancy graphics, but this embryonic broadcast was enough to demonstrate how television could bring ‘the national pastime’ straight into the nation’s living rooms. 

The timing of the milestone is also significant: These games were played just a few months after RCA’s widely publicized TV launch at the New York World’s Fair – and less than a week before Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the start of World War II. 

The war postponed the widespread adoption of television for  another six years, but this first Major League Baseball broadcast established a template for what would eventually become one of television’s most enduring staples. 

From Ebbets Field in 1939 to global satellite broadcasts decades later, television and baseball grew up together. Those flickering images added a new visual dimension to the sport’s ‘golden age’ in the 1950s and 60s. 

Television changed the way fans saw the game. Over the ensuing decades, the revenue generated from television would reshape the economics of not only baseball, but all of America’s major sports. 

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