MLB Network can be found on channel 107 in the Appleton area on Time Warner Cable. Right now there is just a promotional film on the channel. Regular programming starts tomorrow at 5:00pm CDT.
Now, to today's story on the evolution baseball coverage.
Starting with print:
In his book, "But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843-1870," author Peter Morris writes on page 40:"The game's association with the printed word spurred its growth. For starters, print was ideally suited to communicating the changes made by the Knickerbockers. As anyone who has struggled with an instruction manual can appreciate, print is not a medium that is well suited for explaining something to someone who is entirely unfamiliar with it. But ... that was not much of a problem in the 1850s because the country knew the rudiments of the game. More important, print was effective for the task at hand: listing changes, updates, and revisions to an already familiar activity and thereby creating the uniformity that American bat-and-ball games had lacked.
To Telegraph?
In the book "Breaking News: How The Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, And Everything Else," Thomas Edison is quoted on the remarkable manner in which AP set up a single, national circuit for the 1916 World Series that featured a knotted strand 26,000 miles long. That allowed AP to deliver the play-by-play direct from the ballpark to all 700 of its media members with no intervening relay or delay.
To a certain media that is pretty important to me:
That game on Aug. 5, 1921, was broadcast by KDKA of Pittsburgh, and the hometown Pirates beat the cross-state Phillies, 8-5. Harold Arlin was the first announcer. That fall, KDKA and WJZ of Newark, N.J., broadcast the first World Series game on the radio, with Rice and Tommy Cowan calling the games. They were not actually at the game, but rather, were reading the telegraph reports over the radio. The next year, they did it from what would become known as a broadcasting booth.
To another certain media that I've spent a lot of time with:
The first televised baseball game was on May 17, 1939, a 2-1 victory by Princeton over Columbia at the latter's Baker Field. The game was aired on W2XBS, an experimental New York station that later became WNBC-TV.
The first televised MLB game was on Aug. 26 of the same year, once again on W2XBS. Just as Rice had overlapped the transition from print to radio in calling that first game, now Barber was overlapping the transition from radio to TV by calling this Dodgers-Reds doubleheader at Ebbets Field. The Reds won the first game, 5-2, and the Dodgers won the second, 6-1. Barber made the call without benefit of a monitor and with only two cameras capturing the action. One camera was on Barber and the other was behind the plate.
with this little note
The 1948 Boston Braves won the National League flag and drew 1.46 million fans, and then they decided to sell the TV rights to all of their home games for the next two years. Before long, they were raking in TV revenue but fans were staying home in droves to watch on TV instead. In 1953, the Braves moved to Milwaukee and refused all offers to televise home games.
The internet in August 2002
It was an experimental stream of a Rangers-Yankees game, viewed by 30,000 fans, many of whom were at work and going back and forth between work and play windows on their computers. The following season, Major League Baseball became the first sports league to stream its full schedule over the Internet via what would become known to fans worldwide as MLB.TV. It also presented the first opportunity for full-scale on-demand viewing, letting fans choose any half-inning of any game that season as well as classics. In 2008, iTunes downloading of key MLB games became another staple for many of us.
Mobile and MLB Network finish the story.
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