1935: The first night major league baseball game is played at Crosley Field in Cincinnati.
Crosley Field, built in the same era as Boston's Fenway Park and Chicago's Wrigley Field, was smaller than both. In fact, with a seating capacity around 30,000, it held the fewest fans in the majors. But in the mid-1930s the Cincinnati Reds were struggling to fill even those seats.
Night baseball was proposed by team president Larry MacPhail literally as a way of keeping major league baseball in the Queen City. Baseball owners, notoriously skeptical of any kind of change, were initially cool to the idea but relented after MacPhail made it clear the Reds were in danger of folding.
Eight light standards were erected around Crosley Field, housing a total of 632 individual lamps. When the lights were switched on, the hometown Redlegs, with Paul Derringer toeing the slab, beat the visiting Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1, in front of 20,422 fans.
It was not the first professional ballgame to be played under the lights, however. That occurred five years earlier, in 1930, when a Western League game in Des Moines, Iowa, drew 12,000 fans to watch a team that was averaging barely 600 spectators a game.
Night baseball caught on quickly around the majors, except in Chicago. The Cubs kept it pure for decades, but eventually bowed to the economic pressures of prime-time TV. After playing 5,687 consecutive day games at Wrigley Field, the Cubs finally switched on the lights in 1988. Coincidentally, the Philadelphia Phillies were the opponent for that milestone as well.
On a side note, the Reds and Cubs figure in another of baseball's technology firsts: The season before lights came to Crosley Field, the Reds became the first major league club to travel by plane, flying from Cincinnati to Chicago on June 8, 1934.
Photo: Redland Field circa 1920, later renamed Crosley Field. Via Wikipedia.
This article first appeared on Wired.com May 24, 2007.
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