Crosley Field and the Birth of Night Baseball in 1935

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 9 min read

On May 24, 1935, the Cincinnati Reds played the first major-league night game at Crosley Field. This is the story of that game, the attendance gains that followed, the park itself and how lights spread across the sport.

On the evening of May 24, 1935, Cincinnati's Crosley Field hosted the first night game in major-league history. The Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies 2-1 under electric lights, and the switch that turned them on was thrown from the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who pressed a button in Washington to send the signal. It was a stunt and a business decision at the same time. The Reds had been one of the weakest franchises in the National League, and the club's general manager, Larry MacPhail, was looking for any way to put people in the seats.

It worked well enough that the rest of baseball followed, though slowly. By the 1940s night games were routine in most parks. By 1971 the World Series itself had a night game, and the last park to resist, Wrigley Field in Chicago, installed lights in 1988. This article tells the story of that first night in Cincinnati, shows what the attendance figures say about whether lights helped, describes the ballpark where it happened, and traces how an experiment in one midwestern city changed the schedule of the whole sport.

Cincinnati before the lights

The Reds of the early 1930s were a poor team in a small market during the Depression. The club's records in the historical record tell the story: 60-94 in 1932, 58-94 in 1933 and 52-99 in 1934, the fourth eighth-place finish in a row. The 1934 season, the worst of the three, drew 206,773 home fans, about half the league's average of 400,013 per club that year.

The park was already old. The Reds had played at what was then called Redland Field since 1912, and the historical record lists the entire period from 1912 to 1969 under the name Crosley Field, the name the park took in 1934 after Powel Crosley, a Cincinnati manufacturer who had become the club's owner. Crosley's radio and appliance business gave the Reds both money and an interest in promotion. General manager Larry MacPhail, who ran the club's baseball side, was willing to try things other clubs were not.

Night baseball was not a new idea in itself. Lights had been used in organized baseball's minor leagues beginning in 1930, and the Negro league Kansas City Monarchs were among the clubs that played at night with portable lighting in the early 1930s. What no one had done was bring night games to the major leagues, where some owners worried about the quality of play and the loss of the traditional afternoon game. The National League approved a limited number of night games per club for 1935, and the Reds were the first to schedule one.

May 24, 1935: the game

The first scheduled night game had been planned for the day before and was postponed by rain, so the game that is remembered was played on May 24. About 20,000 people came to see it. The Reds won 2-1 over the Phillies. The final score is in the books, and so is the plain fact that nobody who attended had ever seen a major-league game under lights.

The game itself is remembered less for its play than for the precedent. A major-league game had been played under lights and carried through to a result, and that answered the main question the doubters had asked.

The Reds did not play many night games that first season, because the league's limit was small, so most of their home schedule was still afternoons. The importance of the first night game was less in the number of games it began than in what it showed to everyone watching, in the stands and in the other front offices.

What the attendance figures show

The simplest test of whether lights helped is to look at the gate. Here are the Reds' records and home attendance for the decade around 1935, compared with the National League average for the same year.

From 1934 to 1935 the Reds' attendance rose from 206,773 to 448,247, a gain of about 117 percent, while the league average rose from 400,013 to 457,163, a gain of about 14 percent. That is a large difference. By 1935 the Reds had nearly caught the league average after being at about half of it a year earlier.

But the figures also show why the claim has to be made carefully. The team itself improved by 16 wins in 1935 (from 52 to 68) and finished sixth instead of last. A club that is winning more draws more. The economy was also beginning to recover from the worst years of the Depression. And attendance fell back in 1937, when the club lost 98 games, even though it still played night games. The most we can say is that the first season of night baseball coincided with a doubling of the gate, and that the gains were sustained when the team got good: 706,756 in 1938 and 981,443 in 1939, when Cincinnati won the pennant. The 1939 figure is 67 percent above the league average that year.

Season totals hide the size of the change at the ballpark door, so it helps to divide by home dates. In 1934 the Reds drew 206,773 over 78 home games, an average of about 2,650 a game. In 1935, over 76 home games, they drew 448,247, about 5,900 a game. In 1939, over 81 home games, they drew 981,443, about 12,100 a game. A crowd of 12,000 is a very different business from 2,650 scattered across the stands.

What changed on the field

The historical team table shows how much of the improvement was the team itself. In 1934 the Reds scored 590 runs and allowed 801, a margin of minus 211, with a team earned run average of 4.37. By 1939 they scored 767 and allowed 595, a margin of plus 172, with an ERA of 3.27. In 1940 they scored 707 and allowed 528, a margin of plus 179, with an ERA of 3.05. Their complete games rose from 51 in 1934 to 86 in 1939 and 91 in 1940, which says a lot about the starters of those years, Bucky Walters and Paul Derringer among them.

None of that has anything to do with lights, and all of it explains why people came. The honest reading of the Cincinnati evidence is that night baseball and a winning team arrived together, that the first season's gain was too large to be explained by the standings alone, and that the later, bigger gains followed the pennants. Other clubs drew the lesson that lights were worth trying, and the wins of 1939 and 1940 showed what a good team could do with a full house.

Why lights changed the economics

The reasoning behind night baseball was straightforward and did not depend on any single season's figures. In the 1930s most people worked during the day. A weekday afternoon game was available to the unemployed, to people who could leave work, and to children out of school in summer. A game that began after the workday ended opened the ballpark to everyone who held a job. Saturday afternoons and Sundays were already the biggest days for attendance, and a night schedule added more good dates to the calendar.

For a club, more good dates meant more revenue from the same stadium, which is why the experiment spread. In later decades the same schedule suited television, since evening games reached the hours when the largest audiences were at home.

Crosley Field, the park

Crosley Field stood in Cincinnati's West End and served the Reds from 1912 until mid-1970; the historical record lists it as the home park for 1912 through 1969, and for part of 1970. It was a small, compact park by later standards. The highest attendance in a single season at Crosley was 1,125,928, a figure that looks modest next to the 2,629,708 the club drew at Riverfront Stadium in 1976, the franchise's highest.

One feature that fans and writers remembered was the sloped terrace in the outfield, an embankment at the base of the fence in left field that outfielders had to learn to run up and down. It gave the park a character that the multipurpose stadiums of the 1960s and 1970s lacked. Nothing in the historical record shows its measurements, and this article does not give any.

The Crosley years produced a long list of important Reds. The franchise's career leaders include Frank Robinson, who was the Rookie of the Year in 1956, the Most Valuable Player in 1961 and hit 324 home runs for the Reds from 1956 to 1965; Pete Rose, the Rookie of the Year in 1963; and Johnny Bench, whose career began at Crosley in 1967 and who hit 389 home runs for the club. In the pitching leaders are Eppa Rixey, with 179 wins from 1921 to 1933, and Paul Derringer, with 161 wins from 1933 to 1942. For the full story of the team, see the Reds team page.

The pennants at Crosley

Five Reds pennants were won with Crosley Field as the home park (the 1970 one in a season split between two parks). The 1919 Reds, who won the club's first World Series at what was then Redland Field, beat the Chicago White Sox five games to three in a best-of-nine format. The five, with the historical results:

The 1939 and 1940 clubs were the great Crosley teams. Bucky Walters won the Most Valuable Player award in 1939 and Frank McCormick won it in 1940. The 1940 title was only the second in club history. For another view of a Series in this era, the autumn of 1960 is explained in the 1960 World Series, which was played entirely in the daytime, as every World Series was until 1971.

The lights spread

The rest of the game followed Cincinnati at different speeds.

1. 1938. Brooklyn's Ebbets Field hosted its first night game on June 15. Johnny Vander Meer of the Reds pitched a no-hitter that night, his second in a row, and the first of the two had come four days earlier at Crosley.
2. 1939. The American League played its first night games.
3. 1948. Detroit, the last American League club to add lights, played its first night game at what was then Briggs Stadium; the park is covered in the Tiger Stadium article.
4. 1971. The World Series played its first night game, in Pittsburgh.
5. 1988. Chicago's Wrigley Field, the last major-league park without lights, played its first official night game after a rain-out the night before.

Parks that opened after the 1930s were designed for night play from the start. Shea Stadium in New York, Candlestick Park in San Francisco and the Astrodome in Houston all belonged to the new era, and Candlestick in particular shows the other side of the change: night games in a cold, windy park were a different and less comfortable experience from a warm afternoon. The original Comiskey Park in Chicago, which opened in 1910 as a day park, was lit later and kept playing until 1990.

The end of Crosley Field

The Reds moved out of Crosley in 1970. The historical park table lists a transitional entry, "Crosley Field/Riverfront Stadium", for 1970 alone, because the club played the first part of that season in the old park and the second in the new one. The 1970 team, managed by Sparky Anderson, won 102 games, swept Pittsburgh in the NLCS and lost the World Series to Baltimore, four games to one. Anderson managed the club from 1970 to 1978 with an 863-586 record, the most wins among the club's ten longest-serving managers.

Riverfront Stadium, which opened in 1970, was a multipurpose park with an artificial surface, and it was home to the teams of the mid-1970s that won back-to-back World Series in 1975 and 1976. The club later moved again, to a new ballpark, Great American Ball Park, which opened in 2003. Crosley Field itself was demolished, and its place in the sport's history is mostly about one evening.

Common questions

Who played in the first major-league night game? The Cincinnati Reds hosted the Philadelphia Phillies at Crosley Field on May 24, 1935. The Reds won 2-1.

Who turned on the lights? President Franklin D. Roosevelt, by a ceremonial signal sent from Washington.

Why did owners resist night baseball? Some worried about the quality of play, and some saw baseball as a daytime tradition. The Cincinnati experiment gave the other clubs a working example to judge, and the gate figures in 1935 were hard to ignore.

Did lights cause the Reds' attendance to double? Not by themselves. The team also won 16 more games and the economy was beginning to recover. The data show that the gate more than doubled in 1935, but not that lights were the only cause.

When did the last park add lights? Wrigley Field in Chicago, in 1988.

Where to go next

If you want to read about other parks that shaped the way fans watch baseball, start with the Astrodome and Candlestick Park. The way the 1960 Series ended in daylight is in the Mazeroski chapter, and tie-breaking games that changed pennant races are covered in how MLB tiebreakers work. For today's Reds, see the team page and the current standings.