Byrnes: How did baseball fans watch the World Series before TV?

From Mark Byrnes at The Atlantic’s CityLab on October 27, 2014:

Finding a place to watch sports isn’t hard in this country—especially baseball. This week and next, bars around the country (and pretty much anywhere with a TV in Kansas City and San Francisco) will be showing every single World Series game. Just about anyone who wants to can catch them.

A century ago, however, fans keen to watch the game had to be much more resourceful, settling for “game simulations” in rather un-stadium-like locales.

In the 1880s, baseball lovers would crowd for hours in opera houses, watching as behind-the-scenes workers gathered pitch-by-pitch updates via telegram and displayed them on stage.

On a Library of Congress blog, media historian Mark Schubin writes about an Augusta, Georgia opera house, which in 1885 would configure a blackboard that had each team’s lineup, a baseball diamond, punched-out holes for bases, and flags representing a baserunner’s progress. Admission to the board: Ten cents.

A more elaborate scheme could be found in Atlanta’s opera house. Dug up by Hannah Keyser of Metal Floss earlier this year, an April 1866 article in the Atlanta Constitution tells of “actual running of the bases by uniformed boys, who obeyed the telegraph instrument in their moves around the diamond.”

Sounds a little more stimulating than a blackboard. “Great interest prevailed and all enjoyed the report,” according to the newspaper.

Read the full article here: http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/10/how-did-baseball-fans-watch-the-world-series-before-tv/381863/

Related link: “Action Jackson: Watching Baseball Remotely Before TV,” by Eric Zweig (SABR Baseball Research Journal, Summer 2010)



Originally published: October 27, 2014. Last Updated: October 27, 2014.