How Much Television is Enough Television?

             As the 1950s dawned, the question was not just how television should cover baseball, but how much of it should be covered, and what that coverage was doing to the game. As was true in an earlier radio era, baseball in the late 1940s had a difficult time figuring out what to show and when to show it.  If Major League Baseball showed too much too often, game attendance would be reduced.  But the lesson of radio was that while broadcasting might discourage some traditional fans from attending games, it could be used to develop new fans:  women and working class men who had limited interest in or time for spectator sports, and especially the children that baseball needed to perpetuate to grow the national pastime.   Television might do the same, but the risk was much greater. 

The television experience was in some ways better than watching a game at the ballpark.  Even with the limited black and white cameras of the early 1950s, every viewer was closer to the players than any ticket holder.   Television's tightest image was a medium close up that framed the starting pitcher from the chest up.  The pitcher's own catcher could not see him that close.  Television also focused the viewer's experience by limiting the visual field to a prearranged sequence of shots, designed to isolate key moments of action.  The viewer saw what was, in the view of an experienced director, the most important image at any moment in time.  Viewers lost the freedom to let their eyes wander the field of play, but gained a more accessible view of the game.  Television might annoy long-time fans that were comfortable following the game on their own, but the medium would help a new generation of fans to learn the game.  But how many games should be telecast?  Like much of the decentralized decision making that characterized baseball in the 1950s, the answer to that question depended on which team you watched.

In New York and Chicago, you could watch a lot.  “Big Apple” televised coverage started in 1947 when the Dumont network made the Yankees the first team to earn rights fees, paying them $75,000 for the rights to regular season home games.  The Giant’s signed with NBC and the Dodgers with CBS.  Almost immediately, the three New York teams were televising every home game.  New Yorkers could watch at least one and usually two games almost every day of the baseball season.  Because of an abundance of stations by 1948, the selection in Chicago was almost as plentiful:  all Cubs home games were televised as well as most White Sox day games.   In the late 1940s, the Cubs invited all comers with as many as three stations covering the same game, creating a “forest of TV cameras” at Wrigley Field.

But after coverage peaked in the late 1940s, viewing opportunities were much more limited in other markets.  The cities with the most competing television stations (New York and Chicago) had the most televised baseball.  Because they had no need to run network shows, independent (not affiliated with a network) stations like WGN in Chicago and WPIX and WOR in New York could show baseball both day and night.  In cities with few stations, including most smaller and medium markets, there was no room in prime time for baseball because each of the major networks had locked up each station's evening programming.  Night baseball games were getting kicked off the prime time stage.