Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  

Introduction: The Game in the Box  

Part I: The Local Game

1. The Experimental Years    

2. The First Seasons of Televised Baseball     

3. Team Approaches to Television in the Broadcast Era

Part II: The National Game

4. Televising the World Series     

5. Origins of the Game of the Week 

6. The National Television Package, 1966-89    

7. National Broadcasts in the Cable Era  

8. The Pay Television Era    

Part III: Television and Baseball's Dysfunctional Marriage

9. Television As Threat, Television As Savior  

10. Television and the "Death" of the Golden Age Minors    

11. Baseball, Television, Congress, and the Law

12. Baseball and Television Synergy

Part IV: How the Game Was Covered

13. The Announcer in the Television Age  

14. Innovations in Production Practices  

Epilogue: Baseball in the Advanced Media Age   

Appendix A: Televised Baseball Games, 1949-81  

Index

Promotional Information

Explores how television exposed baseball to a genuinely national audience and altered the financial picture for teams, owners, and players

About the Author

James R. Walker is professor of communication and chair of the Department of Communications at Saint Xavier University. Robert V. Bellamy Jr. is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Multimedia Arts at Duquesne University.

Reviews

“Center Field Shot is a winner. It’s smart, crisply written, and packed with eye-opening research and analysis. I learned something new on every page. Turn off the TV and start reading. I guarantee you’ll be glad you did.”—Jonathan Eig, best-selling author of Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season

“At last an intensive analysis of this complicated and fascinating phenomenon has been produced. . . . Center Field Shot is at once a fun, engaging read that can be enjoyed in random five-minute snippets, and a serious full-length work of scholarship. Like the very best of television, it informs as it entertains.”—Steve Treder, The Hardball Times

"Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television successfully tells the story of how the sport made a huge breakthrough arriving in people's homes. . . . Walker and Bellamy provide perhaps the definitive history of the evolution of baseball on television without ever getting too scholarly or slipping into fanciful nostalgia."—Josh Marks, Variety

"A well-told story of owners and networks, businessmen and merchandizing. The best part of this history of baseball on television is its revelation of how broadcasters learned a new craft, a new art form." S. Gittleman, Choice

"More than just baseball history shot through a video lens, Center Field Shot is also a history of television shot through the lens of the national pastime."—Roberta Newman, NINE

"Bellamy and Walker offer a cogent and sophisticated analysis of the consequences of television for baseball, both positive and negative. Their work contains much new information and synthesizes the old with the new in meaningful ways. . . . Center Field Shot is a must for anyone interested in the impact of television on American culture, and on baseball, an American sporting institution that once carried the designation of National Pastime."—Richard C. Crepeau, American Studies