Television’s First Major League Baseball Game

The first ever Major League Baseball game was televised on August 26, 1939 on experimental station W2XBS, which is now WNBC. With Red Barber announcing, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds played a doubleheader at Ebbets Field. The Reds won the first, 5–2 while the Dodgers won the second, 6–1.

Barber called the first game on NBC Radio and moved to TV for the second game which he did without the benefit of a monitor and with only two cameras capturing the game. One camera was close to Barber who had to sit in the stands behind home base. The other was on the first base side up high. During the game, Red’s headset also went out so he was winging more than just the play by play action.

At the time, the New York World’s Fair was in full swing, as was RCA and NBC’s first big television push. Including the sets RCA had installed at the fair and around town, there were only about 400 receivers in the NYC area.

On September 15, 1938, NBC christened it’s new two truck mobile unit on the air by televising man on the street interviews at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. One unit was the camera truck and the other, the transmitter truck.

The first-ever televised baseball game had actually come four months earlier on May 17, 1939. That was a college game between Princeton and Columbia; Princeton beat Columbia 2–1 at Columbia’s Baker Field. The contest was aired on W2XBS and was announced by Bill Stern. Stern almost did not make the opening pitch of that game as he rushed home to get his hair piece.

Broadcasting baseball on the radio was something Stern had done for years and never needed to “look spiffy”. but since General Sarnoff would be watching, he decided he’d better take his hat off for the broadcast. When he did that for the camera before the game, he realized he was missing something he usually wore in the NBC studios doing his daily sport shows. Wonder if Willard Scott ever did that?

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