Baseball’s World Series was broadcast on television for the first time starting on this date in 1947. Viewing of the seven-game series, in which the all-white New York Yankees would defeat the newly integrated Brooklyn Dodgers four games to three, was limited to New York, Philadelphia, Schenectady, and Washington, DC. Both teams had a huge Jewish fan base, and an educated guess would be that at least 25 percent of the four million television viewers were Jewish. (Ralph Branca, the pitcher with the Dodgers who had a 1-1 record in the Series, identified himself in 2011 as having a Jewish mother and relatives who were killed in Nazi concentration camps.) The World Series, begun in 1903, was the invention of Barney Dreyfuss, a German-born Jew who owned the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1900 until his death in 1932.
“Belted [by Joe DiMaggio]! It’s a long one, deep into left center. Back goes [Al] Gionfriddo, back, back, back, back . . . He makes a one-handed catch in front of the bullpen! Oooooh, doctor!” —Red Barber announcing Game 5 [on radio]