In 1935, Larry MacPhail was the general manager of the Reds. He made them the 1st MLB team ever to play under lights. He also put their games on regular radio for the first time, and his broadcaster was Walter "Red" Barber, a rural Floridian who adjusted well to a big city.
In 1938, these two redheads adjusted to a much larger city, New York, when MacPhail was named general manager of the Dodgers, and brought Barber with him, breaking the "gentlemen's agreement" that none of the City's teams would broadcast their games on radio.
MacPhail also made Ebbets Field the 1st of the City's 3 ballparks to put up lights. It may not have been a coincidence that the 1st night game there was against the Reds. Fortunately for baseball history, but unfortunately for the Dodgers, this game, on June 15, 1938, was the game in which the Reds' Johnny Vander Meer became the only man, to this date, to pitch back-to-back no-hitters in the major leagues.
On April 30, 1939, the New York World's Fair got underway in Flushing Meadow-Corona Park in Queens, across Roosevelt Avenue from where Shea Stadium and Citi Field would later be constructed. The opening, with a dedication by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a New Yorker, was the 1st broadcast of W2XBS, New York's 1st television station.
Run by RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, W2XBS was going to be the centerpiece of a new TV network, to go along with the radio network they had established in 1926, the National Broadcasting Company, NBC. Now, it was going to broadcast baseball, and Red Barber was going to call the action.
But only for the 2nd game. The 1st game was won by the Reds, 5-2. This was not surprising: The Dodgers were a team on the rise, and would finish 3rd in the National League that season; but the Reds went on to win the next 2 NL Pennants.
Bucky Walters, the Reds' ace, won his 21st game of the season, outpitching Luke Hamlin. Walters would finish the season 27-11. If there had been a Cy Young Award back then, he surely would have won the NL's edition that season. Hamlin didn't pitch badly, but was undone by 2 errors by his teammates.
Between games, the telecast began. Barber gave a recap of the opener, and conducted interviews, including with Dodger manager and shortstop Leo Durocher. It was the beginning of a long and productive relationship between Barber and television -- and one between Durocher and television, as "Leo the Lip" used the medium, as he had already used print and radio, for his own cynical ends.
The 2nd game was the rescheduling of a game originally set for June 12, postponed not due to weather, but because it was the Opening Day of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Hugh Casey, better known as a reliever, started for Brooklyn, and Johnny Niggeling did so for Cincinnati. As the home team's starting pitcher, Casey thus became the 1st Major League Baseball player to play on television.
The Dodgers got on the board in the bottom of the 2nd inning. Art Parks led off with a single, and Dolph Camilli hit a home run. They broke the game open in the 3rd: Pete Coscarart led off with a single, and Cookie Lavagetto doubled him home. Dixie Walker grounded out, but Parks singled again, and Camilli doubled him home. Al Todd drew a walk, and Ernie Koy singled home Parks and Camilli. The Dodgers led 6-0.
The Reds reached Casey for a run in the 8th, but that was it: The Dodgers won 6-1, and the few hundred people capable of watching this game outside Ebbets Field (where a full house of 33,535 paid to watch) got their money's worth.
Sadly, it appears that no record of this game survives: Not the original TV broadcast, not a radio recording, not a film. The photograph at the top of the page is allegedly from that game.
Later in 1939, W2XBS would also become the 1st TV station in the world to broadcast college football and the 1st to broadcast pro football. In 1940, it became the 1st American TV station to broadcast a National Hockey League game (a British station had telecast a hockey game in London in 1938), the 1st to broadcast a religious service (Easter Mass from St. Patrick's Cathedral, a short walk from the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center), and the 1st to broadcast a political convention (the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, nominating Wendell Willkie to run against FDR, unsuccessfully as it turned out).
On July 1, 1941, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave licenses to W2XBS and W2XAB, which was owned by the Columbia Broadcasting Service, CBS. Doing so on the same day meant that neither could claim to be the 1st. W2XBS became WNBT, broadcasting on Channel 4. They changed their call letters to WRCA in 1954, and to WNBC in 1960. W2XAB broadcast on Channel 2, and became WCBW, and then WCBS in 1946.
The other New York VHF TV stations:
* Channel 5 went on the air on May 2, 1944, on the DuMont Network, with its call letters being WABD, for its founder, Allen B. DuMont, went independent when DuMont folded in 1956, became WNEW in 1958, and WNYW when it became a Fox station in 1956.
* Channel 13 went on the air on May 13, 1948, as an independent station, WATV. It became WNTA in 1958, and WNDT in 1962. That year, it joined National Educational Television (NET), America's 1st "public television" network. In 1970, NET became the Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, and the station's call letters were changed to WNET. Why not WPBS? Those call letters were not already being used, but were subsequently given to a PBS station in Watertown, New York, on the St. Lawrence River, Channel 16.
* Channel 11 went on the air on June 15, 1948, as WPIX, the call letters referring to its ownership by the New York Daily News, "New York's Picture Newspaper." This was not unusual: Many radio TV stations were founded by newspapers. WPIX continues to use the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street as its headquarters, even though the paper has moved its offices elsewhere. The station joined Warner Brothers in 1995, becoming part of The WB. When The WB and UPN merged in 2006 to form The CW, WPIX went along with it.
* Channel 7 went on the air on August 10, 1948, as WJZ, an ABC station, becoming WABC in 1953.
* Channel 9 went on the air on October 11, 1949, as WOR, an independent station, becoming WWOR when bought by MCA in 1987, moved to United Paramount Network (UPN) in 1995, and to MyNetwork in 2006, following the WB/UPN merger.
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