24 May 1935: Crosley Field Turns the Lights On

A President, a Telegraph Key, and 632 Bulbs

On 24 May 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt pressed a telegraph key at the White House and threw 632 floodlights into life at Crosley Field on Findlay Street, making it the site of the first night game in major league baseball history ↗. The Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies 2–1 before a crowd of 20,422 — roughly double what a weekday afternoon game at Crosley typically drew that season.

General Electric supplied and installed the lighting system, mounting fixtures atop eight steel towers around the park's perimeter. The towers rose high enough to project light at angles that minimised shadow across the infield and kept glare off the batter's eye line — a genuine engineering problem at a moment when outdoor artificial lighting on that scale was still uncommon in sports. The total installation cost was reported at around $50,000, a sum Reds general manager Larry MacPhail had fought the club's ownership to approve.

MacPhail was the architect of the idea. He had used night baseball in the minor leagues and understood that a Depression-era working-class city would fill seats after dark in ways it simply could not on a Tuesday afternoon. The Reds were granted seven night games for the 1935 season — the commissioner's office, sceptical, held the number there as a trial. All seven drew crowds substantially above the club's daytime average.

The Phillies, the visitors on that May evening, were themselves a struggling franchise; neither team finished 1935 anywhere near a pennant. The scoreline was almost beside the point. What the night demonstrated was economic: clubs that had been averaging a few thousand midweek could move closer to capacity by shifting start times by six hours. Night baseball spread steadily through the majors over the following decade, and by the early 1940s most teams had installed their own systems.

Crosley Field itself stood until 1972. The light towers are gone, but the date holds.