This day in baseball: Yellow baseballs

For the first game of a doubleheader played on August 2, 1938, Larry MacPhail had official baseballs dyed dandelion yellow, and the balls were used in the matchup between the Dodgers and Cardinals at Ebbets Field.  The inspiration for this yellow ball came from a New York color engineer named Frederic H. Rahr, who developed it after Mickey Cochrane was severely beaned at the plate the previous year.

“My primary object is to give the hitter more safety and there’s no question that this will be achieved,” said Rahr. “That’s simply because the batter will be striking at a ball he can see instead of at a white object that blurs with the background.”

The Dodgers won that opening game with the yellow baseballs by a score of 6-2.  The Dodgers went on to use up their yellow balls in three more games in 1939, but the yellow balls would not get used again after that season.

1938 Yellow Baseball.jpg

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

This day in baseball: Red Barber hired

On April 5, 1934, Cincinnati Reds president Larry MacPhail hired Red Barber to broadcast the team games on WLW radio.  Nicknamed “Ol’ Redhead,” due to the color of his hair, Barber spent the first five years of his Hall of Fame career in Cincinnati before moving to the Dodgers alongside MacPhail in 1939.

red barber

University of Florida

Ken Burns’s Baseball: The Sixth Inning












This day in baseball: First flyers

On June 8, 1934, the Cincinnati Reds became the first team in Major League history to travel by plane, as GM Larry MacPhail flew 19 of his players to Chicago to face the Cubs.  The players boarded two American Airlines Ford Tri-Motors for a three-game series, while six players opted to travel via train. MacPhail believed that the faster mode of transportation would allow for more rest between games.  The Reds won two out of three games in that series.


Larry MacPhail (Wikimedia Commons)