Courtesy of Eric Sorenson at D1 Baseball.
TV has been around for 80-odd years now, and largely determines which sports thrive and which ones suffer. But what was the first televised sports event in the US?
Believe it or not, it was a college baseball game in May 1939, an Ivy League clash between Columbia and Princeton.
The Berlin Olympics had been shown on TV in Europe three years earlier, but Lions vs. Tigers was the first American event. Three months later they aired a Dodgers game from Brooklyn and now we complain that the NLR games aren’t on any form of telecast.
1 Like
You beat me to this!
I was just going to post a link
This item reminds me of another… well, it’s not trivia, more of a ranking. But this item is a clue to my answer to this question:
Who is the best player in MLB history who played college baseball first?
Yep. Played baseball for the Columbia Lions.
Christy Mathewson would be up there too, having played at Bucknell (where he was an all-American football player as a drop-kicker). But I’d have to pick Gehrig over Bonds or Clemens or Reggie or anyone else who ever played college baseball. Of course, Ruth, Aaron, Ted Williams and Mays didn’t play college baseball, among many others.
I have to admit that I was impressed when I attended a game at the old stadium in Tempe. The list of former players on their outfield fence was amazing. That stadium is long gone, as is the ASU dominance in baseball (much to the chagrin of my Arizona State fan friend.)