Night Baseball in 1949
Rarer Than You Might Think
Baseball in 1949
If you had a time machine and went back to 1949, what about baseball would strike you as different?
I can think of a few things off the top of my head:
No television coverage (and very few televisions anywhere at that)
Severe lack of racial integration
No batting helmets
Players leaving their gloves on the field between innings
Old “classic” ballparks that were falling apart
Games that lasted a hair over 2 hours on average
I’m sure you can think of a few other things.
However, one thing you might not think of is that the vast majority of games were played in the daytime.
Day Games
That’s right. Even though night baseball at the major league level had been a thing for almost 15 years, most games were played in the daytime.
By 1949, every club other than the Chicago Cubs had lights in its ballpark. Aside from the neighborhood-centered Cubs, the last team to install lights had been the Detroit Tigers in 1948. And, yes, that means the 1945 World Series was the last World Series to be played in two ballparks completely free of any light fixtures.
However, night baseball was still a novelty in 1949.
I discovered this while looking through the original as-scheduled schedule. I thought it would be interesting to mark which games were played in the day and which were played at night.
For all of its emphasis on split ratings and other intricate odds and ends, Diamond Mind Baseball actually ignores differences between day and night games. This is one of a number of small ways that Diamond Mind is actually behind other baseball computer simulations, most of which include some sort of adjustment between day and night games.
Anyway, as a sample of just how many day games were played, here is a snippet from early April in the original 1949 schedule as originally scheduled, with “D” for day games and “N” for night:
Now, there’s no need to painstakingly go through the entire schedule and count everything. I did the math for you.
375 of the 1,232 scheduled Major League games for 1949 were night games. In other words, 30.44% of all games were scheduled to be night games.
When you look at what was actually played, the numbers are quite similar:
That 375 figure was bumped up to 382 — probably due to day/night doubleheaders used to make up certain games.
In other words, as the schedule actually played out, 31.03% of all games were night games.
Compare that to 2022, and you’ll see what I mean:
In the 2022 regular season, 62.39% of all games were night games.
In other words, we’ve almost come completely full circle. Baseball has evolved over the years from being a mostly day sport to a sport that features mostly night games.
No Novelty
The other interesting thing I found is that night baseball was no longer much of a novelty in 1949.
For example, as I glanced through the schedule, I saw that May 13, 1949 seemed to be the first date in the season with no day games scheduled. However, I couldn’t find any note about this novelty in any newspapers, aside from simply listing all games as “night:”
Even the Tigers first home night game of the season on May 27th didn’t receive much more than a cursory note in the Detroit Free Press:
Fortunately, there was an interesting though unrelated cartoon to keep my spirits up:
