Baseball and Television: History
What's old is new.
Baseball and Television: History
One of the most interesting things my 1949 replay has taught me is just how popular television was at the time.
We tend to think of the mid-1950s as the great era of television. However, I’ve found that I can’t even begin to look through 1949 newspapers without running in to television advertisements all over the place.
I mentioned this subject a while ago in this post. However, after following all the drama surrounding television money and the pending end of the PAC-12, I thought it might be worth bringing up again.
Television and Revenue
I learned an interesting thing the other day. I learned that sportswriters knew about the advertising potential television provided baseball and other sports long before most official histories claim.
Check out this wire article from January 1949, for example:
Note the phrasing here: “[R]adio reports of games just whetted the appetites of the fans so that parks bulged at the seams with citizens eager to see what they had been hearing.”
There’s no question that baseball profited greatly from exposure during the early days of television. Attendance at major league parks may have shrunk in the early 1950s — but perhaps this was due to the poor state of repair owners allowed certain ballparks to sink into, making the televised version more desirable in comparison.
The solution should have been obvious: use television as an advertising medium for the real thing. Or, as Warren Giles put it, “become a self competitor:”
Of course, it wouldn’t be fair if we ignored the real danger that television posed to minor league baseball. You may have read this famous 1948 Sporting News report before:
I’m not a professional historian, nor do I have the time to chase after every potential source or read what everybody else has said on the subject. I’m perfectly happy for you to leave a comment telling me what I’m missing in this discussion, or an email telling me how I’ve oversimplified the problem.
What I’ve learned over time, however, is that this worry about television damaging the smallest teams spread far beyond the world of baseball. Among other things, it resulted in association football in England not being broadcast on live television until 1983, as well as the infamous, decades-long NCAA monopoly on televised college football.
The idea here is pretty simple. Fans will only want to watch the most popular teams, or the most meaningful games. If teams are paid rights fees for each broadcast, the teams that wind up in first place will have far more money than any other team in the league, making them nearly impossible to unseat.
It’s why you see Celtic and Rangers dominate Scottish football every year, and why clubs like PSG and Bayern Münich are unstoppable domestically. Playing in the UEFA Champions League grants teams more money and exposure than they could ever receive domestically — and, at some point, that extra money upsets the balance of power so much that games are no longer competitive.
At one point in time, I thought this didn’t apply to baseball. And then I read this famous Bill James piece in his New Historical Baseball Abstract:
Now, the interesting thing here is not that James so aptly predicted the market conditions that would lead to college football’s unavoidable permanent alteration so many years in advance. Remember that this book was printed in 2001 (this is the first edition), at a time where nobody ever thought the PAC might cease to exist.
No — the interesting thing here is that this is exactly the same problem we were dealing with in 1948. The question of television rights, of media revenue sharing and attempts to prevent the Yankees and Dodgers from permanently having a higher payroll than other teams, is a question that knows no geographic or time constraints.
And that is exactly why we’re seeing schools desert the PAC as if it were the Titanic.
Demand
The problem, of course, is that you can’t solve this issue by simply not televising games.
I wish more people would watch baseball on television. In fact, I kind of long for the days when only a few games were televised — back when it felt like something special.
Those days aren’t coming back, however. For one thing, there’s no reason to leave money on the table like that.
Fans will complain if they have no access to the particular game they want to see. And, to be honest, there’s no reason for the Jake Pirrungs of the world to be so upset:
It’s foolish, of course, to deny local fans the ability to see their own ballclub. In fact, in the long term, it’s absolutely ridiculous to not use local broadcasts of baseball games as a method to grow your fan base. Kids aren’t going to magically become Oakland A’s fans if they can’t watch the team, after all.
This is one reason why I’m so intrigued at reports of NBA teams offering games on free television again. I doubt I’m ever going to pay for any sort of subscription television package — but I might be inclined to buy an antenna if I can watch some basketball.
The short term contract might not be so lucrative — but, then again, it’s really hard to build a new generation of fans behind a paywall. And, of course, it’s impossible to build that generation of fans if they can’t watch the game at all. Remember the final years of the Montreal Expos?