It was 1947, and few had ever seen a baseball game on TV - let alone a World Series contest. It was 75 years ago that viewers not at the ballpark actually got to watch a championship game in its entirety for the first time - the Yankees against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And even then it almost didn't happen. 

"The predictable stumbling block was money. Baseball commissioner Albert B. “Happy” Chandler wanted $100,000 for the television rights to the Series. Gillette, the sponsor of the radio coverage on the Mutual Broadcasting System, balked at the steep price given television’s limited penetration – only 50,000 to 60,000 U.S. households owned TVs at the time. The radio rights to reach the nation’s 29 million homes with radios had cost Mutual only $175,000.

"Initial negotiations produced an offer of $60,000 from two sponsors: Gillette and the Ford Motor Company. New York’s Liebmann Breweries offered to meet Chandler’s $100,000 demand, but the commissioner refused because he did not want beer ads when youngsters would be prominent members of the audience."

My how times and standards have changed!

In the end, they came to an agreement and get this - the Series aired on all three New York City TV stations at the same time, something that could never happen today. Here's the story of the first-ever televised World Series and why it was almost a swing and a miss. 

The first televised World Series spurred America’s television boom, 75 years ago