Center Field Shot 

                                                                 Television Love and Hate

                Television was considered a real benefit to both minor and major league baseball as the medium was becoming established.  At the end of the 1948 season, for example, the owners of the AAA Milwaukee Brewers claimed that having all 77 home games broadcast helped “create many new fans, especially women” and generated “just enough interest” to get fans to the ball park. Major league teams, with a couple of striking exceptions, were quick to embrace the new medium as were baseball fans.  By May 1948, the highest rated telecast in the New York market was Yankees baseball. Even in the midst of such good times, the baseball press, as exemplified by The Sporting News, was already launching an anti-TV screed in the peak year of 1949. 

              Once both major and minor league attendance started to decline in 1950, the knives were sharpened in the television attack.  By 1952, U.S. News & World Report reported, “television is blamed by most minor-league clubs for their reversal of prosperity.” By 1954, television was called a modern day "cyclops …wreaking havoc with us” and guilty of “a clear case of murder.”  By 1955, the Milwaukee Braves were looking to relocate its AAA Toledo farm club to “a city without expressway links to a major league city, and one that is beyond the range of major-league telecasts.”

              There is a serious problem with all the anti-television hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s.  This is the simple fact is that there was minimal baseball on television outside major league markets during the period of most rapid decline.  The beginning of the minor’s decline happened in the middle of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) freeze on new television station applications.  For a four-year period from 1948 to 1952), the FCC issued no new television licenses as it attempted to settle a series of technical issues regarding the allocation of frequencies around the country.  By the end of the freeze, only 108 stations were on the air.  Most of these were restricted to the largest markets, which varied widely in allocations (e.g., New York and Los Angeles had seven licensees each and Pittsburgh only one).