Celebrating the night game that illuminated MLB’s future
Even as the global pandemic continues to cast a dark shadow over world sports, Major League Baseball is commemorating the 85th anniversary of one of its “brightest” milestones this week.
On May 24, 1935, the first night game in MLB history was played at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, where the home team defeated the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1.
The game started at 8:30pm when US President Franklin D. Roosevelt threw a ceremonial switch at the White House in Washington,
lighting up the park in Cincinnati.
“As soon as I saw the lights come on, I knew they were there to stay,” the late Red Barber, broadcaster for the Reds at the time, recalled when he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1978. “The lights were perfect. There were no shadows. Everything was lovely.”
A reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote that the field “looked far greener at night than during the day, and that balls hit high in the air stood out against the sky like pearls against dark velvet.”
Pro baseball’s first night game held under a permanent lighting system took place on May 2, 1930, at Des Moines, Iowa, where the minorleague Demons beat the visiting Wichita Aviators, 13-6. The game attracted 12,000 fans — 20 times the average attendance for a day game — and was broadcast nationally in the US by NBC Radio.
Night baseball quickly caught on in the minors and did much to reinvigorate attendances, helping draw fans out into the cooler night air in the days before home air conditioning was widespread.
The rapid growth of night baseball in the minors in the first half of the 1930s did not go unnoticed by MLB, but the aura of gimmickry was a turnoff for some owners. Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, famously said in 1933: “There is no chance of night baseball ever becoming popular in the bigger cities. High-class baseball cannot be played at night.”
He couldn’t have been more wrong. Despite the fanfare surrounding the first MLB game under lights, baseball’s introduction of night games was years behind other sports.
On July 18, 1878, a polo match between Ranelagh Polo Club and the Hurlingham Club in Fulham, England, became the world’s first night game when elevated light standards illuminated the playing area as darkness descended.
English soccer quickly followed suit, with an experimental game played under floodlights powered by batteries and dynamos at Bramall Lane, the home of Sheffield United, in September 1878.
Over the following decades, lights were periodically used for unofficial “friendlies” until Arsenal installed permanent lights at its former Highbury home in north London in 1932.
Australian Rules Football was next to use floodlights 20 years later, during a game between Essendon and Geelong at the Brisbane Exhibition Ground on June 16, 1952. Later that year, cricket decided to get in on the act and millions of Australians watched the new night games on their own burgeoning technology: television.
The first international soccer game played under floodlights was England versus Spain on Sept 30, 1955, with England winning 4-1 at Wembley.
On Feb 22, 1956, Portsmouth played Newcastle United under floodlights at Fratton Park, with the match becoming the first official English Football League match to be played with the new technology, aiding the players’ performances and the fans’ enjoyment.