I came across a couple of pretty interesting photos that I thought I would pass along. These show crowds gathered around a high-tech “electric scoreboard” for the 1912 World Series between Boston and New York:
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Since the Washington Post was sponsoring this scoreboard, I’m assuming the photos are from D.C. Getting these type of “real time” updates must’ve been a thrilling experience for baseball fans of that era.
Come to think of think of it, this scoreboard doesn’t really look all that different from the online gamecasts that ESPN, CBS, Yahoo! and all the other online media outlets use today to pass along game information to those sitting in front of computers.
Would the crowds gathered together to watch in the streets back in 1912 be the equivalent of the Sons of Sam Horn message board?
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those are cool, it has to be Washington, the scores are labelled “Nationals” and Opponents
Actually the Washington team in 1912 was called the Senators. So they had that scoreboard set up for
“Nationals” National League versus “Opponents”.
The OFFICIAL name for the team in 1912 was the Washington Nationals, as it was starting in 1905. “Nationals” and “Senators” were used interchangably They weren’t officially named the Senators until 1955.
Take a look here.
On SoSH we don’t wear quite as many jaunty hats.
Maybe you ought to!
Merkle’s Boner
Snodgrass’s Muff
Gotta love the Giants!!
I got to say, nice figure on that big-hatted gal in the white dress.
the men in the pic seem to think so too, all their heads are pointed in that direction rather than up at the scoreboard.
Thanks for posting those. Pretty interesting. I love seeing stuff like that from another era.
….nice pictures…was it against the law to NOT wear a hat back then?
What great snapshots of history. Thanks for posting these.
The second of those photos is looking east down E Street. The intersection with 14th street is behind the photographer, and the White House is about two blocks further back.
My father once told me he saw a scoreboard of this type in downtown Providence for the 1918 WS.