A little while back Albert J. McGilvray asked the following question on the Facebook group, The Historical Negro League Baseball Site: “Were any Negro League games ever televised?”

I responded with some items I had recently run across (purely by coincidence). It’s a closed group, and I don’t recall anybody ever addressing this question in any other forum, so I thought I’d share what I found here.

1) In 1947 a game between the Newark Eagles and New York Black Yankees was supposed to have been televised, according to the New York Amsterdam News (June 21, 1947, p. 20):

As far as I can tell this passage refers to a game that was played on Thursday, June 19, in Newark’s Ruppert Stadium (the Eagles won 4-3). I haven’t found any confirmation that the game was actually televised. Joe Bostic was the Amsterdam News sports editor as well as a radio announcer/DJ and (years later) ringside announcer at Madison Square Garden.

2) On June 6, 1948, the Cleveland station WEWS televised a Memphis Red Sox-Cleveland Buckeyes doubleheader. This one is confirmed by one of the radio broadcasters, legendary sportswriter A. S. “Doc” Young in the pages of the Cleveland Call and Post:

And here is a photo of the broadcasters and their setup:

Paul Hodges and Van Patrick had both worked on Indians’ broadcasts that season, Hodges doing pre-game interviews, Patrick handling the play-by-play. Hodges, a former newspaperman, also did fight commentary and lots of other tv work for WEWS, including a game show called Dress and Guess in which contestants tried to “figure out what famous person [Hodges] was portraying before he got all his clothes on.” Patrick did the television play-by-play for the Indians’ World Series games that October, and would go on to broadcast for both the Detroit Tigers and Detroit Lions for many years.

 

Unfortunately, like much of early television (especially sports) the Buckeyes-Red Sox games were probably not recorded.

So, to sum up: while it’s possible that the June 19, 1947, Eagles-Black Yankees game was the first televised Negro league baseball game, for now the first confirmed instance is the June 6, 1948, Buckeyes-Red Sox doubleheader. There may well have been other games, in Newark, Cleveland, or elsewhere, that made it onto very early television screens—if anybody has ever heard of any, let me know.

UPDATE 8:58 pm: Mark Aubrey found the following listing for the Eagles-Black Yankees game on June 19, 1947. It was scheduled to air on WCBS-TV, Channel 2, opposite what sounds like some pretty stiff competition: “The Wife Saver” and “You Are the Artist” on WNBT, and “Col. Stoopnagle” on WABD.