Getting the Information
Spoiled aren’t we?
Internet, ESPN, Baseball Weekly, Baseball America, The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, Fantasy Baseball, Strat-o-Matic, Amazon, SABR, Chat Boards, MLB.Com, Baseball Prospectus, Hardball Times, FSN, Extra Innings, MLB Audio, and even the daily paper.
All of that for games, all that for the tracking the minutia of a sport that can dump out more connected facts and figures then most events. It’s a treasure trove of information, a bucket of nuggets and future barroom banter.
It’s baseball and it’s what some of us think about too much.
Well, at least I’ve t heard that before…
Could that help point out how spoiled we are as fans? I often wonder how much information do we get each day and toss aside? I’d venture to guess that it’s a lot more than we used to get in a week or even a month. Of course it wasn’t like this all the time, many of you remember the days of scanning the first sports ticker for the update, others can remember calling 800 lines to get the score, or those of us who called the Sports Department at the local paper to get the score from some kid next to the ticker. We’d wait for The Sporting News to come so we could see al the teams numbers in one place, each Thursday we’d wait for SI to come so we could see color photos of guys who lived on our baseball cards tucked in a box under our beds.
Infancy - The Word
Information has always been the currency to the fan and the tool that the team could use to get fans interested. Let’s credit Henry Chadwick for his “Ball Players’Chronicle” a baseball weekly that appeared on the scene in 1867, fueling the fire of a game that was sweeping the eastern seaboard. This format is still alive today and many publications provide weekly updates with statistics, editorials and game stories recanting games that are played outside of your own town. Chadwick’s grasp on the game continued with his The Beadles Dime Base Ball Player, A compendium of the elementary instructions of this American Game of Ball. This proved to be the basis for most of today’s games rules and the love baseball fans have for off season periodicals.
Getting the Word Out
Back in the days of the horse and buggy the local nine was often a niche business that often favored the working class as patrons and made an attempt to draw a healthy rank of attendees from local watering holes. In the mid 1890’s it was a common occurrence for a young boy to deliver to these saloons and eateries large printed cards that held the day’s game results, with some appropriate advertising on the sides of the card. These could be distributed or displayed, always creating conversation and most likely some future plans to visit the park. By the time the men had finished their post work revelry they would head home with the afternoon paper which had countless stories about the prior days game as well as a flowery description of the events, written in a style that delivered the gods, but lost its flair in the faster paced world.
With the industrialization of America’s cities grew a large need for commercialized entertainment and usually out of a need comes innovation, and as the games popularity grew it created needs to feed the publics hunger for baseball news and in this need we can see the birth of the “Sports Departments” a section of a news business that is solely needed to report the games and the teams gossip. The weeklies grew as well and The Sporting News was claiming 60,000 readers by 1888, however the fans dreams of absolute coverage was further enhanced by Hearst’s papers when they introduced the Sports Page in the dailies in the late 1890’s.
Another amazing thing in those days could be found in any local tavern that had a telegraph or access to a local line. Some would advertise this little tidbit in the papers with ads proclaiming ‘Base Ball scores received by innings” In the establishment the telegraph operator who manned his station would receive the scores and mark them on a slate chalkboard for the patrons to see. The use of slate even prompted a New York City slate company to advertise that a business that purchased their slate would draw “A crowd about your place of business which you would not gather by any other means short of a fire.” Further innovation in displaying the games results was soon appearing across the country, and folks were hungry for up to the minute details of a games actions, even if it was not in their own state. In Atlanta young boys were placed on stage with the players names on their backs and they reenacted the games action on small-scale baseball diamond on the stage of the city Opera House.
With this electronic age came the ability to dress up these displays even more, small towns would track the World Series at the local square using colored lights to correspond with certain game events, red for a strike, blue for outs etc. In larger towns such as LA the newspapers would place 8 foot or more high scoreboards in local areas such as the YMCA, boasting in the ad that the scoreboard was the result of seven years of study and was a “wonder in its way.”
Out of the need for these events rose companies that predate the Game Trackers and Gamecast of today’s Internet game tracking. Some had fanciful names such as “The Playograph” and others were generated from companies devoted to building nothing but the scoreboards like the Jackson Manikin Board Company, which showed mechanical players moving in and out of the dugout on their boards.
The World Series was the big event that grabbed the nation and it was at this time that the board down at the corner became the most important tool in getting the game to the fans not located in the cities of play. By the late 1920’s it was not uncommon for as many as 10,000 people to gather at Times Square to watch the progress of the Series on the scoreboard, while down the street newsboys posted mini scoreboards on their news stands, anything to gain attention and maybe a sale of a paper or two.
Come On Feel Noise
On August 5th 1921 Harold Arlin a Westinghouse employee, used a converted telephone to broadcast a baseball game between the Pirates and the Phillies at Forbes Field, this was heard on Pittsburgh’s KDKA. It was the first broadcast of a major league game.
Thus a new conduit to the fans was now available, like any technology it would face hurdles before it could be an accepted across the board as a daily tool to inform the fans of the games actions. So unaccepted at its inception it was not uncommon to find men fully entrenched in the world of baseball making light of it daily. None ring more hollow in retrospect then New York Giants executive Tierney’s assertion that it was “impossible and absurd” when told of a proposal to broadcast all the teams games. His reasoning was that “It would cut into our attendance, besides hurting the newspapers. We want fans following the games from the grandstands, not from their homes. “” The Baseball Writers of America petitioned Judge Landis to squash out the audio menace, claiming, ” “Play-play detail broadcast from the park would kill circulation of afternoon papers and in the end would result in a curtailment of baseball publicity.” “Eventually the Judge decided to let the clubs decide for themselves and in 1925 Phil Wrigley became the first owner to allow broadcasting of all his teams games and in the din of the approval around the city the fans still showed up to see the Cubs play at Wrigley, just as they do today. Between 1922 and 1929 the amount of money spent on radio accessories jumped from 60 million to 842 million. By the late 1930’s the scoreboard was being replaced in public areas by a live broadcast of the game.
In 1939 the same path trod by radio was taken by television and by 1956 the even Cincinnati Reds televised every away game and more than a few select home games.
However if you missed the game or didn’t know more than the score you were still left twisting in the wind, waiting for the more than just the score, and this was available only from the papers who still despite radio and television had a hand in the game and its much needed publicity. In the paper you got the most information they still posted the daily leaders board, box scores, recaps and standings. Finding a sports section from another city in the summer was a treasure, finding a Sunday section with a Peter Gammons article was heaven as well. Things stayed status quo for the next 30 years with the late scores coming at the end of the 11:00 news or in the barrage of George Michaels Sports Machine, if all else failed you could call the news department and bother Jimmy Olsen for the score, after all isn’t that why they’re there?
This all changed about the time people started to use computers in their daily lives and loud cheers in sports departments and former jocks homes could be heard when ESPN introduced the “Bottom Line,” (a copy of CNN’s financial ticker) in 1996. This invention of the scrolling line at the bottom of the screen changed the landscape of the fan who isn’t in the stands, it freed us from calling sports departments at 2 in the morning after a night out drinking, or stomaching local news and all its pain. The scroll kicked open the door to the world we dwell in today, a world with Gamecast and instant updates for your fantasy team and your favorite team, subscription services and data feeds, excel spreadsheets and PECOTA.
There has never been a better time to be a fan as far as information is concerned and there is nothing more fun then diving into some of this stuff every now and then.
Take it from me, at one time in my life I thought the publication The National was the greatest thing that had ever used paper as a medium.