The First World Series “Broadcasts”: The Megaphone Man
How did baseball fans follow the World Series before television or radio?
Outside of the cities where the games were played, did anybody know what was happening? Did they care? - Norman L. Macht
They cared, all right, enough to stand for hours in streets and parks, in the rain of the south, the cold of the Midwest, the fog of the northeast and the heat of the southwest, in cities and towns across the country, to see and hear the action.
What they saw was sometimes no more than a bulletin board, but often it was a graphic recreation of the games on displays that ranged from simple homemade diagrams to elaborate patented mechanical and electrical devices.
The Megaphone Man
What they heard was the predecessor of the modern booths full of broadcasters and analysts: the Megaphone Man.
Backed by a telegraph operator who received reports of every pitch by Morse code, the Megaphone Man stood in front of the display and read the reports as they were handed to him.
Over the years these announcers developed individual dramatic styles and routines of patter to fill in the lulls in the action.
The first modern World Series in 1903 drew little attention and scant newspaper coverage. It was a private challenge between Pittsburgh’s pennant-winning Pirates and the Boston Americans.
The two clubs made up their own rules and schedule.
In 1904 New York Giants manager John McGraw and team owner John T. Brush ignored the pleas of New York players and fans and refused to set foot on the same field with the upstart American League winners.
“As far as I am concerned,” said McGraw, “winning the National League pennant makes us the champions of the world.”
That winter the two leagues formally agreed to make the World Series an annual event.
Its official status and the national reputations of the two 1905 winners – McGraw’s Giants and Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics – attracted nationwide interest in the games.
It had become the custom for many newspapers to post the scores of the afternoon’s games during the season in their windows.
Saloons offered Western Union tickers that carried play-by-play reports. The names of New York stars Christy Mathewson, Iron Man Joe McGinnity and Roger Bresnahan, as well as Chief Bender and Eddie Plank of the A’s, were as well known to fans in Texas and California as they were in the cities where they performed.
According to one newspaper account, “The Athletics and Giants fought for the world championship while hundreds of thousands of fans scanned bulletin boards from here to Frisco and thousands of tickers chattered out the news.”
But that was not enough for the fans in Philadelphia and New York who couldn’t squeeze into the small ballparks.
Many of the dozen newspapers in each city erected huge scoreboards on the upper stories of downtown buildings.
For the first game on October 9, thousands stood in the streets and blocked traffic, listening intently as the Megaphone Man bawled out: “Bresnahan at the bat . . . ball one . . . strike one . . . Bresnahan singles to center field . . .”
When the Giants took a 2-0 lead in the fifth inning, the cheering was as loud and enthusiastic in the streets of New York as it was at the game itself.
Philadelphia fans had little to cheer about on Broad Street as Mathewson pitched the first of his three shutouts in six days.
Pennant fever is not a modern epidemic. Baltimore, where it may have started, won the first of three straight National League flags in 1894.
Live from Ford’s Opera House
At Ford’s Opera House, the Temple Cup playoffs were carried “live” by Compton’s Electrical System.
A diagram of the playing field was drawn on a large board and a light bulb placed at each base. As a batter ran, the bulbs lit up to show the bases touched.
Outfield positions were also marked with bulbs. There were lights to indicate balls, strikes and outs, foul balls, bunts, sacrifices, double plays and errors.
The innings and score were shown in Roman numerals. Lineups were listed on either side of the field; a small light glowed beside the name of the man at bat.
When the Giants and A’s met again in 1911, Compton’s system was installed at the Real Estate and Ideal Home Show in Madison Square Garden; 50 cents was the admission charge and Miss Gertrude L. Van Djense, soprano, entertained before the game.
Over time, other devices- some simple and others requiring several operators- began to appear. The Star Ball Players was an electromagnetic setup with magnets moving metal balls around the bases.
For the 1912 Series between the Giants and Red Sox, it was erected in Madison Square Garden, and in theaters and roller rinks throughout New York and Brooklyn.
Christy Mathewson endorsed it in newspaper ads: “If I could not see the real game, I would rather see it reproduced upon the Star Ball Player than by any other means.”
At the same time, in Asheville, North Carolina, and many other small towns, a more basic system was used to display the action. Thomas Wolfe described one such setup in Of Time and the River.
The scene Wolfe sets has a man sitting at a window wearing earphone, listening to a telephone transmission from someone at the game. Cardboard placards, used to indicate the ball and strike count on the batter, are spread out on a table before him.
He operates a complicated frame of wires and rows and columns in the window, placing a new placard on the line and removing the previous one as events occur. When a pinch hitter comes into the game, a boy runs outside with a card bearing the name of the new batter, takes from a groove the old name and shoves in the new.
In the street below, the people watch, tense and silent; from time to time they break into a wild cheer as the action moves them.
In the tenth inning of the last game of the Series, when a dropped fly ball and a pop foul that falls untouched lead to Mathewson’s toughest World Series loss, Wolfe describes the scene:
“And suddenly, even as the busy figures swarm and move there in the window before the waiting crowd, the bitter thrilling game is over . . . “
The peak of ingenuity was reached by Jackson’s Baseball Manikins in 1913, when the Giants were defeated by the Athletics.
Billed as the world’s greatest novelty, the Jackson board was a miniature ballpark, 34 by 54 feet, complete with fences and scoreboards.
Mechanical figures did everything the players did on the field: bat, run, throw and catch, argue with the umpires – “everything but talk.”
The umpire indicated balls and strikes; the catcher walked out to talk to the pitcher and hand him the ball; the batter came out of the dugout and strode to the plate; coaches wigwagged signs; the ball followed the actual path of the ball in the game.
It was like watching the game from a hot air balloon or a rooftop two blocks away.
When the Giants played the White Sox in 1917, New York fans stood in Times Square or outside the offices of the New York World or Brooklyn Eagle, watching the games on electric displays.
To start, the ball would twirl on the mound, then move by a series of lights to the plate.
Lights traced the path of the ball when it was hit and thrown to a base. If hit to the outfield, it would circle or twirl to indicate an out; for a hit, the ball stopped in the outfield, and then returned to the pitcher as a small figure ran the bases.
A home run was shown by the ball soaring over the painted fence and the runner circling the bases.
The Playograph
By the 1920s, the Playograph was widely used. Claiming to be so accurate and detailed that no Megaphone Man was needed, it featured a real ball hung from an invisible cord.
Baserunners’ progress was marked by a series of white footprints. Made of metal, it was entirely mechanical and took six men to operate.
In addition to the weather and sore feet, spectators in the streets had another problem.
Prior to the Yankees and Giants meeting for the third straight year in 1923, a fan wrote a letter to the editor of the Press-Gazette in Green Bay, Wisconsin:
“Last year I was one of the crowd that stood there for several hours each day and I noticed one thing that was particularly annoying.
“It seemed that every time there was a tense situation, either Babe Ruth up to bat with the tying run on the bases or Frisch up with the count of 3 and 2, some farmer with a heavy wagon would come rattling along over the pavement, drowning out the announcements while we waited in terrible suspense to know the worst.
“Would it not be a fine idea if this block could be made a ‘Zone of Quiet’ each day for two hours during the series?”
From Worcester, Massachusetts, to Mexico City (where a retired Western Union telegrapher cleaned up betting on what the next batter would do after picking up the tell-tale clicks before it was announced), theaters, parks and streets were packed every fall.
Baseball fever was so virulent in Salt Lake City, the Tribune built a huge board to display the Salt Lake Bees’ games in the Pacific Coast League as well as the World Series.
Dubbed Old Ironsides, it required three men and several copyboys to operate the levers and contact wheels.
In 1928 the Tribune made a deal with NBC to tie Old Ironsides into the radio broadcast for the first audio-visual coverage of a World Series, Old Ironsides was still in operation when the Yankees and Giants met again in 1951.
As radios became more common in homes and offices in the 1930s, the Playographs and electric boards and Jackson’s amazing Manikins began to disappear.
By 1939 most of them had been dismantled and scrapped or stored away in now-forgotten warehouses.
But for 40 years, every October, as a great stadium in a distant city emptied, millions of baseball fans moved singly down the streets of a thousand towns, each remembering how he had watched the World Series game that day, wherever it was played.
