Baseball Enters the Color Television Age at Ebbets Field

On August 11, 1951, WCBS-TV in New York City broadcast the first baseball game ever televised in color, as the Brooklyn Dodgers hosted the Boston Braves in the first game of a doubleheader at Ebbets Field. Announcers Red Barber and Connie Desmond called the action, giving a small number of viewers their first glimpse of baseball's green grass, brown dirt, and white uniforms rendered in something other than shades of gray.

The broadcast used CBS's field-sequential color system, a technology the network had been developing and lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to adopt as the national standard. The system was incompatible with existing black-and-white television sets, which meant the vast majority of TV owners in America could not receive the color signal. Only viewers with specially equipped CBS color receivers saw the broadcast in its intended form.

The technical limitations meant the audience was tiny. Most people who watched the Dodgers-Braves game that afternoon saw it in black and white, if they saw it at all. But the broadcast proved that color television could handle a live sporting event, with all the challenges of changing light, fast-moving action, and unpredictable camera angles that baseball presented.

Television was already transforming baseball by 1951. The sport had been broadcast in black and white since August 26, 1939, when NBC televised a Reds-Dodgers doubleheader from Ebbets Field to a few hundred TV sets in the New York area. By the early 1950s, the Game of the Week and World Series broadcasts were drawing millions. The addition of color was the next logical step.

The technology took years to mature. NBC eventually won the color standard battle with its compatible system, and color broadcasts did not become widespread until the mid-1960s. But the seed was planted at Ebbets Field on a Saturday afternoon in 1951, when Barber's familiar voice described the Dodgers and Braves in living color for the first time.