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Last week we brought you the first ever televised MLB game that took place at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Well, today we bring you the first ever sporting event televised, and it was a baseball game in Manhattan at Columbia University. There the Lions nine of Columbia took on the Princeton Tigers under the electronic eye of NBC cameras. More people probably saw the game at the actual field than on a television set being at the time only 400 sets were in local households, but that was little concern for NBC as they saw great potential in this new medium, so they televised the second game of the Ivy League doubleheader to mixed results. The NY Times declared “it is difficult to see how this sort of thing can catch the public fancy”. Well, I guess we can all see how terribly wrong this newspaper turned out to be. As for the game the Princeton beat Columbia 2-1 in ten innings as the Tigers’ hurler Dan Carmichael got the win and scored the winning run.
And maybe it’s just a coincidence but one thing I noticed is the Columbia-Princeton game that NBC televised was the second game of a doubleheader, just like the first Major League game at Ebbets Field. I wonder if the reason was so they could go through a dry run with the first game and then putting the second game on the air live.
