On May 24, 1935, the Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies 2-1 at Crosley Field — in the first night game in Major League Baseball history. Baseball had been a day game for 60 years. Owners thought playing under lights was a gimmick that cheapened the sport. Most ballparks didn't have electricity beyond the clubhouse. Then Reds GM Larry MacPhail — a marketing-mad innovator who'd later push the Yankees to play night games too — convinced the league to allow Cincinnati one experiment. The Reds installed 632 floodlights, totaling one million watts. President Franklin D. Roosevelt threw the symbolic switch from a button at the White House. 20,422 fans showed up — more than triple the Reds' average attendance that year. Paul Derringer threw a complete game for the Reds. Babe Herman drove in the winning run. Most importantly: nobody got hurt under the lights. The experiment worked. Within five years, half of MLB had installed lights. Within 50, day games were the rarity, not the night ones. Every MLB ballpark today plays the vast majority of its games at night. Every World Series game since 1985 has been a prime-time broadcast. The infrastructure that built modern baseball — the TV money, the prime-time culture, the dad-takes-his-kid-to-a-game-after-work tradition — all traces back to one Friday night in Cincinnati.
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