First TV Baseball Game: Red Barber Calls the Action

Red Barber stood behind a microphone at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn on August 26, 1939, calling a baseball game into two cameras and out through the experimental television station W2XBS. Fewer than 400 television sets existed in the New York metropolitan area. Nearly every one of them was tuned in to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds play the first major league baseball game ever televised, in a doubleheader that would change how America consumed sports. Television was still a novelty in 1939. NBC had begun regular broadcasts only months earlier, and the medium's commercial viability was far from certain. The broadcast was arranged as part of a larger push by NBC to demonstrate television's potential at the 1939 World's Fair. Barber, already the Dodgers' popular radio voice, called the game without a monitor, relying on two stationary cameras: one pointed at him, the other behind home plate. He had to guess which camera was live based on which indicator light was illuminated and where it was aimed. The picture quality was poor by any standard. Viewers saw grainy images on screens roughly five inches wide. Players were difficult to distinguish, and the ball was nearly invisible. The Reds won the first game 5-2; the Dodgers took the second 6-1. Barber later recalled that the experience felt experimental and slightly absurd, like broadcasting into a void. The handful of viewers who watched on their sets reportedly found it mesmerizing nonetheless. The broadcast had no immediate commercial impact, but it proved the concept that sports could drive television adoption. World War II delayed television's expansion for six years, but when sets became widely available in the late 1940s, baseball was the programming that sold them. By 1950, the World Series was a national television event drawing tens of millions of viewers. The marriage between sports and television eventually generated hundreds of billions of dollars and fundamentally altered how games are played, scheduled, and funded. That entire industry traces its origin to two cameras, one announcer, and a doubleheader in Brooklyn.