Unit 13 · Numbers and Squares

In the late 1800s most fans followed a distant game through the telegraph, a machine that sent coded messages over wires. Western Union operators at ballparks tapped out each play. Newspapers posted the results on boards outside their offices, and crowds stood in the street to read them inning by inning.

Radio stations later used the same wires. An announcer in a studio read a short telegraph message, such as a batter’s name and the result, and then described the play as if he could see it. This was called a re-creation. Sound effects, like a pencil tapping wood for the crack of a bat, filled the gaps.

The best-known example came from Iowa in the 1930s. At station WHO in Des Moines, a young announcer named Ronald Reagan re-created Chicago Cubs games from telegraph reports. Decades later he became president of the United States. Re-creations lasted into the 1950s for some road games, because sending an announcer to travel cost more than a wire.

Commercial radio was new in 1921. On August 5 of that year, station KDKA in Pittsburgh carried a game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies at Forbes Field. The announcer was Harold Arlin, a young worker at the Westinghouse company that owned the station. It is usually named as the first major league game on radio.

Arlin sat in the stands with a telephone-style microphone. He later said he was not sure anyone was listening. Few homes owned a receiver yet. Many early listeners built their own sets from kits or heard broadcasts in stores and clubs that owned one.

That October the World Series between the New York Giants and the New York Yankees also went out over radio. Reports were relayed from the ballpark to stations in the New York area. Within a few years, the World Series was a yearly national broadcast, and the announcer became a voice fans knew as well as the players.

In the 1920s many club owners feared radio. They thought fans who could hear a game for free would stop buying tickets. Chicago Cubs owner William Wrigley Jr. took the opposite view. He let several Chicago stations carry Cubs games at the same time, and he did not charge them a rights fee.

WGN radio, owned by the Chicago Tribune, began carrying Cubs games in the mid-1920s. Wrigley believed radio would make new fans, especially women and children at home in the afternoon. Attendance at Wrigley Field rose in the late 1920s, and other clubs took notice of the Cubs’ results.

New York went the other way. From 1934 through 1938, the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers agreed not to broadcast their home games. In 1939 the new Dodgers leader, Larry MacPhail, broke the radio ban. He hired Red Barber, an announcer he had brought to fame in Cincinnati, to call Dodgers games on the air.

A network is a group of stations that carry the same program at the same time, linked by telephone lines. The National Broadcasting Company, NBC, began as a network in 1926. Before networks, a game reached only listeners near one station’s own tower.

On January 1, 1927, NBC carried the Rose Bowl football game from Pasadena, California. It is often named as the first sports event broadcast from coast to coast. A college game in California could now be heard live in Illinois and New York on the same afternoon.

Graham McNamee, an NBC announcer, called World Series games through much of the 1920s. Critics complained that he talked more about the crowd and the weather than about the plays. Listeners loved him anyway. His fame showed that the voice describing a game could become part of the product that stations sold to sponsors.

On May 17, 1939, an experimental NBC station called W2XBS showed a college baseball game between Princeton and Columbia in New York. Bill Stern described the game. There was a single camera, set on the third-base side. It could not follow a fly ball, so viewers often saw the players but not the ball.

On August 26, 1939, the same station showed a major league game for the first time. The Cincinnati Reds played the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field. Red Barber called the game and read commercials on camera. The station used two cameras this time, one near home plate and one high in the upper deck.

Only a small number of homes around New York had a television set in 1939. The Second World War then slowed television’s growth, because factories turned to war work. Regular telecasts of sports spread in the late 1940s, once sets came back into stores.

The World Series was first shown on television in 1947, when the Yankees played the Dodgers. Many people watched in bars and store windows, because few families owned a set. In Chicago, WGN-TV began showing Cubs games in 1948, with Jack Brickhouse as its best-known voice for decades.

Through the 1950s, sets became cheaper and stations opened in city after city. A family’s living room became a place where a whole season could be watched. Games that had once been heard as voices were now seen as pictures, framed by where the cameras stood.

Owners argued about television the same way they had argued about radio. Some minor league clubs lost fans when major league games reached their towns on television. The number of minor leagues fell sharply in the 1950s. Historians point to several causes, including television, the move of families to suburbs and new forms of entertainment.

In the 1950s each National Football League team sold its own television rights. Big-city teams earned much more than small-city teams. Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner from 1960, wanted the league to sell all its games in one package and share the money equally.

In 1961 the league signed such a deal with CBS. A federal judge blocked it, ruling that it broke antitrust law, the laws against businesses joining together to limit competition. Rozelle and the leagues asked Congress for help. Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act, and President John F. Kennedy signed it on September 30, 1961.

The act allowed football, baseball, basketball and hockey leagues to pool their rights and sell them together. It did not cover college football. The act also let a league black out a telecast near a home game. In 1973 Congress added a rule that NFL home games sold out 72 hours ahead could not be blacked out locally.

On April 29, 1961, ABC began a Saturday program called Wide World of Sports. Producer Roone Arledge sent crews to events many Americans had never seen, from ski jumping to rodeo. The show used close-up cameras and personal stories to hold viewers who did not already follow a sport.

The first championship game between the NFL and the rival American Football League was played on January 15, 1967, in Los Angeles. It was later called Super Bowl I. Both CBS and NBC showed it, because each network held rights to one of the two leagues. The two leagues fully merged in 1970.

On September 21, 1970, ABC began Monday Night Football. Evening hours are called prime time, when the most people watch television. A game in prime time had to compete with comedies and dramas for the same audience. Arledge added more cameras and three announcers to make the game feel like an event.

On December 7, 1963, CBS showed the Army–Navy football game from Philadelphia. The director, Tony Verna, had a heavy videotape machine in the truck. Videotape recorded pictures on magnetic tape that could be played back at once, unlike film, which had to be developed.

When Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh ran for a touchdown, Verna played the tape back seconds later. Announcer Lindsey Nelson warned viewers that this was not live and that Army had not scored again. This was the first instant replay in a live American sports telecast.

Within a few years, networks added slow-motion replays and replays from several camera angles. Replay changed how viewers judged a play. A moment that once passed in a second could now be watched again and again. A replayed moment became a highlight, a short piece that could be shown after the game was over.

Cable television sends programs through wires to homes that pay for a service, instead of through the air. By the late 1970s, satellites let a cable channel reach systems across the country. Bill Rasmussen and his son Scott started a channel to show sports from Connecticut and beyond.

The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, ESPN, went on the air on September 7, 1979, from Bristol, Connecticut. Its first program was SportsCenter, a news show made of scores and highlights. Early ESPN filled many hours with events networks did not carry, such as college games and smaller sports.

SportsCenter showed dozens of games in one hour, each cut to its best seconds. Fans could now see a game’s biggest moments without watching the game. Historians of media point out that this made the highlight, not the full game, the way many people came to know a season. The twenty-four-hour channel always needed new clips to fill time.

At first, replay was only for viewers at home. Officials on the field could not use it. That changed as fans saw close calls again and again and argued that the officials had been wrong. Leagues began writing replay review into their rules, letting an official check a recording before a call became final.

The National Football League first used replay review in 1986. It dropped the system after the 1991 season, partly because reviews made games longer. The league brought back a new version in 1999, in which coaches could challenge a call. The National Basketball Association began reviewing some last-second shots in 2002.

Major League Baseball was slower. It began reviewing disputed home run calls in August 2008. In 2014 it widened review to many more kinds of plays and gave managers challenges. Each league had to decide which calls a camera could judge and which stayed with the human official.

The International Amateur Athletic Federation, the IAAF, was founded in 1912. One of its first jobs was to ratify world records, which means to check and officially approve them. A record needed a certified track, approved officials and approved timing. The body was renamed World Athletics in 2019.

For decades, officials timed races by hand with stopwatches, pressing a button when they saw the starter’s smoke and again when a runner reached the line. Human reaction time made hand times slightly fast, and they were rounded to tenths of a second. Several timers stood at the line, and officials compared their watches.

Fully automatic timing starts the clock from the starter’s gun and stops it from a photo at the finish line. It measures in hundredths of a second. Beginning in 1977, the IAAF accepted only fully automatic times for world records in sprint races. A hand time and an electric time for the same run are not the same number, so old and new sprint marks cannot be compared evenly.

A tailwind is wind blowing from behind, in the direction an athlete is moving. In races up to 200 meters and in the long jump and triple jump, it can help. Track rules therefore place a wind gauge, a device that measures wind speed, beside the track or runway.

If the tailwind is above 2.0 meters per second, a mark can still win the race, but it cannot count as a record. Record lists call it wind-aided. The limit of 2.0 meters per second is about 4.5 miles per hour, a light breeze to a person standing still.

The rule itself has caused arguments. At the 1988 U.S. Olympic Trials in Indianapolis, Florence Griffith Joyner ran the 100 meters in 10.49 seconds. The gauge for her race read zero, while gauges for nearby events showed strong wind. Some researchers argued the gauge was faulty. The record was ratified and still stood decades later.

Ty Cobb played in the major leagues from 1905 to 1928, mostly for the Detroit Tigers. For decades his career hit total was listed as 4,191, the most in history. In 1985 Pete Rose passed that number, and the chase made the exact total front-page news.

Before then, researchers checking old box scores found a problem. One 1910 Detroit game appeared to have been counted twice in Cobb’s totals. Without the extra game, Cobb had 4,189 hits. The Sporting News published the finding around 1981. A box score is the printed table of each player’s results in one game.

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s office decided not to change the official record. Major League Baseball kept 4,191, while some research-based books list 4,189. The dispute shows that a record is only as good as the paper behind it, and that the body with authority decides which paper counts.

Mexico City sits about 2,240 meters, more than 7,300 feet, above sea level. It hosted the Summer Olympics in October 1968. At that altitude the air is thinner. Thin air pushes back less on a moving body, which helps sprinters and jumpers, but it holds less oxygen, which slows distance runners.

On October 18, 1968, Bob Beamon of the United States long jumped 8.90 meters. The old world record was 8.35, so he beat it by 55 centimeters, a jump far larger than any earlier record gain. His mark stood for almost 23 years, until Mike Powell jumped 8.95 meters in Tokyo on August 30, 1991.

Other records fell at those Games too. Jim Hines ran the 100 meters in 9.95 seconds, and Lee Evans ran the 400 meters in 43.86. Many experts linked the marks to altitude, and record lists began to note high-altitude marks. Distance races were slower, and runners who lived and trained at altitude, from Kenya and Ethiopia, did well.

On July 20, 1984, East German thrower Uwe Hohn threw the javelin 104.80 meters in East Berlin. That is longer than a football field. Officials worried that throws were becoming long enough to land beyond the infield and endanger people. Javelins were also often landing flat, which made marks hard to judge.

The IAAF changed the implement, the object thrown. For men, the new javelin, used from 1986, moved its center of gravity, the balance point, 4 centimeters toward the tip. The new design came down sooner and landed point first. The women’s javelin was changed in the same way in 1999.

Because the object changed, old marks could not fairly be compared with new ones. The IAAF started a new record list for the new javelin. Hohn’s 104.80 meters remains a mark from a different specification, a written set of measurements that defines the equipment. The event kept its name, but its record book began again.

In 2008 swimsuit makers released full-body suits with panels of polyurethane, a plastic material. The best known was Speedo’s LZR Racer. The suits squeezed the body and trapped air, which helped swimmers float and slide through water. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, swimmers set many world records, most of them in the new suits.

Makers then built suits made entirely of polyurethane and neoprene. At the 2009 World Championships in Rome, swimmers broke dozens of world records in a single week. Critics said the sport was measuring suits, not swimmers. The debate was called technological doping, a phrase comparing gear to banned drugs.

FINA, the world governing body for swimming, changed its rules. From January 1, 2010, suits had to be made of textile, woven cloth, and could not cover the whole body. Many records set in 2008 and 2009 stood for years afterward. Swimmers after 2010 had to chase marks set in gear they were no longer allowed to wear.

Doping means using banned drugs or methods to improve performance. Stimulants such as amphetamines were used in cycling and other sports by the mid-1900s. On July 13, 1967, British cyclist Tom Simpson collapsed and died climbing Mont Ventoux during the Tour de France. Amphetamines were found in his body and in his clothing.

The International Olympic Committee formed a Medical Commission in 1967. At the 1968 Winter and Summer Games, it tested athletes for banned substances for the first time. At the Mexico City Games, Swedish pentathlete Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall was disqualified after a test found alcohol, which was on the banned list for shooting. His team lost its bronze medal.

Early tests could find only some drugs. Anabolic steroids, drugs that build muscle, were added to the IOC’s banned list in the mid-1970s, once a reliable test existed. From the start, the rule makers were a step behind the drug makers. That gap has shaped arguments about which records to trust.

On September 24, 1988, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson won the Olympic 100 meters in Seoul in 9.79 seconds, a world record. Three days later the IOC announced that his test had found stanozolol, an anabolic steroid. He was stripped of the gold medal, and the record was erased. Carl Lewis of the United States received the gold.

Canada held a public inquiry led by Justice Charles Dubin, which reported in 1990. Johnson testified that he had used steroids for years. The inquiry found that drug use was widespread in the sport. The IAAF later also removed a 1987 world record Johnson had set, after his own testimony.

In 1998 police found banned drugs with a cycling team, Festina, during the Tour de France. The IOC called a world conference, and the World Anti-Doping Agency, WADA, was founded on November 10, 1999. Its World Anti-Doping Code, first in force in 2004, gave most sports one shared list of banned substances and one set of sanctions.

East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, won many Olympic medals in the 1970s and 1980s for a country of about 17 million people. After Germany reunited in 1990, researchers read files of the Stasi, the East German secret police. They found records of a state program that gave athletes steroids, often without telling them.

The researchers Brigitte Berendonk and Werner Franke published these findings in the 1990s. The files named a secret plan known as State Plan 14.25. Many of the athletes were teenagers. In 2000 German courts convicted former sports officials and doctors for harming athletes’ health.

Few East German athletes failed a test during their careers, because the program also tested athletes before they left the country. Some world records from that era still stood decades later. Governing bodies generally do not erase a record without a positive test or a confession. So the argument over those marks rests on documents rather than on test results.

Women first ran the 800 meters at the Olympics in Amsterdam in 1928. Newspapers reported that runners were exhausted at the finish, and some officials used the reports to argue the distance was too hard for women. The event was dropped. Women did not run an Olympic race longer than 200 meters again until the 800 meters returned in 1960 in Rome.

The Boston Marathon did not accept women. In 1966 Roberta Gibb ran it without an official number. In 1967 Kathrine Switzer entered as "K. V. Switzer" and received a number, and an official tried to pull her from the course. The race officially opened to women in 1972.

The first Olympic women’s marathon was held in Los Angeles in 1984, and Joan Benoit of the United States won. Longer track races came later still. When a women’s event was excluded, there was no official record to break. The record book for those events measures only the years when women were allowed to start.

Black players were kept out of the American and National Leagues until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. For decades, official baseball statistics, the counted numbers of a player’s results, left out the Negro Leagues entirely. Their greatest players had no place in the record book.

On December 16, 2020, Major League Baseball announced that it would recognize seven Negro Leagues that played from 1920 to 1948 as major leagues. The first of them, the Negro National League, was founded in Kansas City in 1920 under Rube Foster, who ran the Chicago American Giants. Researchers had spent years gathering box scores from Black newspapers to rebuild the numbers.

In May 2024, MLB added those statistics to its official records. Josh Gibson, a catcher for the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords, became the career leader in batting average at .372, ahead of Ty Cobb. Negro Leagues seasons were shorter, and many box scores are incomplete. Critics and supporters alike agree the record now counts players it once excluded.