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Dumont TV cameramen, Yankee Stadium, 1949
Private Collection
On October 2, 1947, the World Series opener at Yankee Stadium was televised to a purported 3.9 million fans. Most of them watched not at home but at bars or through the windows of appliance stores. But people were buying the five- and seven-inch TVs as fast as they could be manufactured. By 1953, 44 percent of households owned a television set, and baseball was broadcast locally for all three teams and nationally on Saturdays through Game of the Week. As the new technology brought real-time baseball into the home through radio and television, fans' personal attachments to individual players grew as strong as their civic, familial, or cultural attachment to their team.
