Baseball Changes Channels: The Dodgers, the Giants and the Birth of Pay TV

By David Gunzerath

While commonplace today, pay television didn't exist in the 1950s when the Brooklyn Dodgers' Walter O'Malley and the New York Giants' Horace Stoneham were looking to address attendance declines they believed were caused by overexposure of their teams' games on local television. Their solution was to partner with a dynamic Hollywood entrepreneur named Matty Fox to create a first-of-its-kind subscription television service where TV viewers would become paying customers just like those fans who purchased tickets at the ballpark.

This is the story of how the promise of pay TV--and an eye on reaping millions-- helped set into motion a series of events that included the relocations of the Dodgers and Giants to cities 3,000 miles away. As the book demonstrates, this journey had many twists and turns and ultimately changed the businesses of both baseball and television, with reverberations still being felt today.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1476699739
• ISBN13: 9781476699738
• Release Date: June 2027
• Publisher: McFarland & Company
• Length: 186 Pages
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up