This day in history changed things in a good way.

[Gregg]

FIRST TELEVISED MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL GAME
The first televised Major League baseball game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York on Aug. 26, 1939, was broadcasted on station W2XBS

[TranaGreg]

that's pretty cool.

This reminds me of something I wanted to post here but I don't think I ever got around to it. I watched game 7 of the 1960 World Series last year on the train to Montreal and it was wonderful. In case you don't know the story behind the video ...

Prior to the mid-1970s, television networks and stations generally did not preserve their telecasts of sporting events, choosing instead to tape over them. As a result, the broadcasts of the first six games are no longer known to exist. The lone exception is a black-and-white kinescope of the entire telecast of Game 7, which was discovered in a wine cellar in Bing Crosby's home in Hillsborough, California in December 2009.[9]

A part-owner of the Pirates who was too superstitious to watch the Series live, Crosby listened to the decisive contest with his wife Kathryn and two friends on a shortwave radio in Paris, France. Wanting to watch the game at a later date only if the Pirates won, he arranged for a company to record it. After viewing the kinescope, he placed it in his wine cellar, where it went untouched for 49 years. It was finally found by Robert Bader, vice-president of marketing and production for Bing Crosby Enterprises, while looking through videotapes of Crosby's television specials which were to be transferred to DVD. The five-reel set is the only known complete copy of the historic game, which was originally broadcast in color.[9]

The NBC television announcers for the Series were Bob Prince and Mel Allen, the primary play-by-play voices for the Pirates and Yankees respectively. Prince called the first half of Game 7 and conducted postgame interviews in the Pittsburgh clubhouse, while Allen did the latter portion

The ESPN broadcast was a live viewing in a theatre with many of the remaining players who were still alive in 2010 watching. Of course they had never seen the game before aside from playing in it. Some very cool moments interviewing them. It's on youtube (I'd put up a link but am at work).

[revo]

The Dodgers were one of the few teams in baseball who embraced television. Nearly all the other teams shunned it, believing it to detract from their far more lucrative gate revenues.

Red Barber was hired as their play-by-play guy solely because he was very good at generating excitement, which the Dodgers thought would lead to more people wanting to attend the games.

The Dodgers also convinced MLB to allow them to move to LA, with much of their new revenues to be derived from a primitive "pay per view" closed-circuit subscription TV service company, which never got off the ground. The plan called for people with this service ("Skiatron") to pay 50 cents per game.

So while in fact the first televised game happened in 1939, most of baseball never fully embraced television until, believe it or not, the early 1980s, and this directly led to the disruptions of the 1980s and 1990s.

[nullnor]

https://www.google.com/#q=wsj+real+world+weirdos

A ragged team of introverts whose social deficits are insignificant compared with the glories of the 16mm and 35mm prints stashed in their basements.

history is always saved somewhere. they aren't talking about baseball here. but it's an example. somewhere someone does have it.

Sept. 30, 2016 1:41 p.m. ET

There have been film collectors for as long as there has been film. For most of the 20th century, they operated on the edge of the film industry. Projectionists would conveniently lose a print, TV stations would sell their 16mm prints out the back door, laboratories would make up 50 more prints than had been ordered and sell the excess. The studio considered collectors little better than film pirates (and some were), but the devotion that many collectors had to creations that otherwise would have been forgotten ended up preserving them for prosperity.