These days, we take it for granted that we can watch baseball live on our televisions, but as we know, baseball has existed well before the television — well before the invention of the moving picture, or “movie,” in fact. And for the longest time, the idea of being able to take in a baseball game live without being physically present at the ballpark appeared ludicrous to teams: the first live radio broadcast of a game did not occur until 1920, and even in the early 1930s, the league’s owners, fearful
that fans would prefer to listen to a game for free rather than pay to watch in person, toyed with the idea of banning radio broadcasts entirely; even then, it spread rather slowly, and did not become a regular occurrence in New York until 1939.
That being said, while live broadcasts took some time to come around, a perhaps surprising market for films about baseball began to erupt in the 1900s. Between films about the sport to snippets of live game action (typically individual at bats) circulated as shorts, Hollywood began to experiment with America’s pastime as one of its main subject areas. As such, the National Commission — the predecessor to the Office of the Commissioner, created when the NL and AL joined forces in 1903 and replaced in the aftermath of the Black Sox Scandal — as early as 1906 began to work side-by-side with the new film companies in order to produce World Series highlight reels for distribution. At first, these deals were for relatively miniscule amounts, somewhere in the ballpark of $500 (roughly the equivalent of $17,000 today), intended less as a means of raising money and more to combat the rise of illegal films (that’s right, illegal broadcasts have existed since the dawn of the film industry!).
Everything changed on this day in 1911, however. On this day 115 years ago, the National Commission completed a deal to license the motion picture rights for the 1911 World Series between the Philadelphia Athletics and New York Giants (a rematch of the 1905 Series) for $3500 — a sevenfold increase, and worth roughly $120,000 today. While even the inflation-adjusted measure pales in comparison to the amount of money in sports these days, back in 1911, when the World Series was just in its eighth year, this deal was a pretty penny. Unsurprisingly, when they heard about it, the players demanded a share in the money — and rather than share the profits, the Commission simply canceled the deal.
A few years later, the National Commission revisited the issue, and in 1913, an $8000 deal (roughly $270,000 today) was struck which allocated a pool of money to the players in the World Series. Soon after that, during World War I, highlight reels were put together to send to soldiers overseas, and since then, the amount of Major League Baseball games filmed only increased until almost every one is available to watch (a handful of spring training matchups being the one exception). And yet, in many ways, this story still resonates today, because…well, the details may change, but the story remains the same. Throughout its history, Major League Baseball has done a terrible job at thinking about the big picture. The Commission in the early 1900s wanted to avoid setting the precedent that players get a share in new revenue streams, and thus were willing to completely forego a new revenue stream that would have seen them partner with a rapidly growing industry that had the potential to quickly increase interest in the professional sport and turn it from a Northeast/Midwestern regional game into the national phenomenon it would become. A few years ago, Rob Manfred’s office devalued its existing broadcasting deals by selling the Sunday morning time slot — a streaming-only primetime game that nobody, and I mean nobody asked for — at such a low value that ESPN opted out of its Sunday Night Baseball deal, worth half a billion dollars; in order to find a few pennies under the couch, the league ended up ruining an antique sofa.
As we enter the final weeks of the baseball season, and our attention inevitably shifts towards the impending lockout, we need to keep this history in mind. The league will, as it did last time, try to spin its proposals as important reforms necessary for the future of the sport. History tells us, though, that the league is much more likely to cut off its nose to spite its face, and is instead trying to pickpocket a few extra dollars in 2027 and 2028, with no care whether or not how that might affect things down the road.
