I"m part of a group that shares vintage baseball photographs. I recently saw a picture of a ballpark in 1909 which had an out of town scoreboard. Radio had just recently been invented, so I doubt that radio was used as a method of communication for trivial things such as baseball scores. I assume the same for the telephone.
So, would there have been a telegraph at a place such as a baseball stadium? Would they be communicating with all the other ball parks by a telegraph and Morse Code?
I put this in GQ because it’s not really a baseball question.
You wouldn’t need instantaneous communication of results–so you could just spend the 15 minutes or whatever needed to just go to the local telegraph office.
Telegraphed baseball results have a long history, and were mentioned in 1891 in the book Baseball by Newton Crane:
Some idea of the hold the game has on the American people may be gathered from the fact that during the playing season every league game is reported, innings by innings, by special telegraph wires and news agencies. These reports are displayed on the bulletin-boards of newspaper offices, in hotel corridors, saloons, and clubs. An enterprising New York newspaper hit upon a novel device for catering to the great desire for information of the progress of the games in which the New York club was engaged. A board, ten feet square, was erected on the outside of the building, between the windows on the first floor. This was marked off to represent the diagram of a ball-field. Movable discs bearing numbers corresponding to those of the players of the two sides were arranged in the various positions on the field, those of the batsmen being inserted, as the men went to bat, at the home plate. On a balcony or platform in front of this board were a telegraph operator, with a telegraph instrument, and a scorer. As the instrument ticked out each move on the field a thousand miles away, the scorer moved his discs to interpret the play to the throngs in the street below. The latter shouted or groaned in response as a favourite player made a run, or a “put out” was scored against him. In other cities halls were hired to show the play on similar diagrams, and a consider-able admission fee was charged to witness it.
As late as the 1950s some radio broadcasts were actually in-studio re-creations of telegraphed results. There are stories of announcers having to cover up the temporary loss of a link by claiming the current batter was hitting an awful lot of foul balls.
Something similar was done in the 19th c. for telegraphing the results of a US/Ireland international shooting match. The target was divided into very small squares and a word was printed on each square. The position of each shot corresponded to a word, which was telegraphed across the Atlantic so that the plotting diagram could be reconstructed in real time.
In the mid-70s, I had a newspaper article describing a radio station in a small town which still did real-time re-creations of road games for their local minor-league baseball team (though, I think, at that point, they had someone using a phone to call in the play-by-play, rather than the telegraph). The article talked about the history of the technique, dating back to the telegraph, and that this particular station (and announcer) may well have been the last practitioner of it.
It’s a common misconception that early telephone and telegraph systems were used mainly to tell someone, “I’m coming home for Christmas!” or “You have a new grandson!” In fact, the primary users of the first telephone and telegraph exchanges were news services, stock exchanges, railroads, businesses, etc. Sports scores and game results were transmitted very early (certainly prior to 1889, 20 years before your picture) in many areas of the country.
It was not at all unusual for news services (including sports reporting) to lease wires that were in service 24 hours a day, receiving both news and sports results almost continuously. The stock exchanges and brokers did the same thing, but to an even greater degree.
Telephones were in use in 1909. I use the 1909 Elyria, Ohio phone book from time to time in the library. They may have earlier ones. The rates were pricey. Even the phone book was pricey, I think it was $15. But there were still hundreds of phones in Elyria.
I worked with someone who had been an announcer at a small radio network, and he described actually doing this in the late 1960’s or so. Small, rural network that was too cheap/too broke to pay the network for the real-time linkup.
I’ve don’t quite a bit of baseball research for SABR. I conclude that telegraphic play by play results and summaries were not always accurate. The news service provider also had something to do with that. Actual results in a local paper where a reporter was at the game were quite often more accurate.
I can recall until sometime in the late 40s listening to telegraphic reconstruction of games. The same announcer might do a telegraphic reconstruction, say, of the Phillies playing the Cubs in the afternoon and then do a live broadcast of the White Sox playing the A’s at home in the evening. It was probably around 1949 that all games were broadcast live and then the A’s and Phillies were on different stations. One was on AM at 950 kH and the other at 990 and I discovered that by tuning to 970, I could listen to both games at the same time. Since there was only one announcer and no color commentators, there was a lot of dead air and the games didn’t clash that much.
This thread reminds me of listening to Les Keiter in the late 50s of the previous century do recreations on the radio in NYC from telegraph updates of the NY (SF) Giants after they had moved to the west coast leaving behind many fans hungry for Giant baseball news. He had tapes of crowd recordings that played in the background and which were amped up in volume when an exciting play happened. And whenever a ball was hit, he would tap the mike with a pencil (?) to recreate the sound of wood on horsehide.
Similarly for the 1938 the cricket Test series between England and Australia in England, play was broadcast “live” to Australian audiences delayed by about minute or so in a process called a synthetic cricket broadcast
Yes, Garry Wills tells that story in his very good early bio Reagan’s America. To drag things out and kill time while he (more and more nervously) waited for the telegraph connection to be fixed, Reagan riffed on all kinds of things he couldn’t actually see - a pretty girl in the stands, a man with an unusual hat, etc.
Not baseball, but in the movie The Sting a key plot point involves “real time” horse racing results from Western Union (via ticker machine) and re-creation of the call of each race.