Pantomime Baseball

Ever heard of this?

Pantomime Baseball

If you couldn’t get tickets to the 1924 World Series — and there were a lot of people who wanted to go but couldn’t get tickets — you had a few choices.

One was to listen to the radio broadcasts:

From The Washington Evening Star, October 4, 1924, page 9

From The New York Daily News, October 6, 1924, page 29

Now, radio broadcasts in those days weren’t exactly like listening to Vin Scully announce a game. The quality was pretty poor. Early radio broadcasters often had a hard time knowing what to tell the viewing audience, and were routinely criticized in the newspapers as a result.

Your other choice, if the team was on the road, was to attend a pantomime recreation of the game:

From The Washington Times, October 7, 1924, page 20

And it seems that quite a few people watched live:

From The Washington Times, October 7, 1924, page 3

Of course, there was also the more traditional method of waiting outside the newspaper office for the scoreboard to be updated. And apparently at least one theater got in on the act:

From The Washington Evening Star, October 7, 1924, page 23

Or, as a last resort, you could wait for one of the late editions of the local newspapers to at least update the score:

From The Washington Evening Star, October 7, 1924, page 1

However, I’d like to read more about the pantomime effort. It seems to me that it wouldn’t be easy to get something like that to work.