Center Field Shot 

                                     Television as Threat, Television as Savior

From the beginning, baseball saw television as a threat; television, however, saw baseball as an opportunity.   In one of the earliest references to televised baseball published in January 1925, the New York Herald Tribune lamented that baseball on television would prove “Another Menace to Sports.”  Although the first very crude mechanical television pictures had been demonstrated only recently, the Herald Tribune’s W.O. McGeehan predicted that in the future “persons possessing these machines will be able to sit in their homes or offices and watch the World Series . . . without having to contribute to the gate receipts.”  For baseball, the stakes were high. “How long could Colonel Ruppert support Yankee Stadium and Mr. Babe Ruth if there were no gate receipts?”

McGeehan’s initial reaction to “these machines” would be reflected in the received wisdom about televising baseball for the next 40 years.  When McGeehan expressed his concern, radio broadcasting of Major League Baseball had barely gotten started.  In New York, the nation’s largest market and the home of baseball’s most consistently successful franchises, regular season radio coverage would be delayed until 1939.

The Broadcast “Problem”

The leadership of baseball was dominated by aging “giants” who invented the modern game:  Connie Mack, Clark Griffith, John McGraw, Jacob Ruppert, Judge Landis, and later, Babe Ruth’s ghost writer, Ford Frick.  Their business sense was formed in the P.T. Barnum era of  “the greatest show on earth.”  Broadway, burlesque, and baseball were all live events to be experienced in the flesh.  Revenue came from ticket sales, concessions, and ballpark billboards.  Attendance and revenues for most teams were tiny by modern standards, but the reserve clause controlled labor costs.  With a little success more than enough fans would turn out.  Profits were modest, but owners only needed enough profit to support their families:  the era of shareholders demanding ever increasing corporate profit was decades away in baseball.   In the 1920s, the new medium of radio and the distant prospect of television were considered “problems” to be managed, rather than a means to a greater market for the owners’ baseball product.  But other forces would offer an antithesis to baseball’s cautious, conservative thesis.

 The countering wind came from broadcasters, advertisers, and a new generation of owners who saw the potential power of radio and television.  Perhaps most influential among the new owners were William K. Wrigley and his son Philip K. Wrigley.  They would be the most consistently pro-broadcast forces among the baseball owners for two generations.  Unlike some owners, former players who obtained teams early in the century, William Wrigley developed his business acumen selling a product that no one needed, costs only a few cents, and required a mass market to be successful:  chewing gum.  In a business that required millions of repeat customers to be really successful, mass advertising made that success possible and new advertising media (radio and later television) were opportunities for even greater profit.