Fort Wayne hosted the first night baseball game, in 1883.

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Famous Stories & the Record

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The game. On 2 June 1883 (Visit Fort Wayne's blog says 3 June, flagged), Jenney Electric lit League Park with 17 arc lamps of 4,000 candlepower for Quincy vs. Methodist College, Quincy winning 19–11 before ~2,000. The Gazette, the Fort Wayne News and Sporting Life all panned the light. The Fort Wayne night game scheduled first, vs. Indianapolis, 29–30 May, was rained out and never played as billed.

The superlative. An amateur night game had already been played at Hull, Massachusetts, in 1880. The defensible version, “first night game involving a professional team”, is still contested.

Sources: 19th Century Baseball, 19cbaseball.com; TinCaps/SABR summary, oursportscentral.com

The game that got there first, in full. On Thursday 2 September 1880 — three years before Fort Wayne's — the Northern Electric Light Company staged a demonstration at Nantasket Beach in Hull, Massachusetts, behind the Sea Foam House on Strawberry Hill, to sell towns on electric street lighting. Three wooden towers about a hundred feet tall, set 500 feet apart, carried 36 carbon-arc lamps between them, some 90,000 candlepower off a 30-horsepower dynamo. The players were employee teams of two Boston department stores, Jordan Marsh & Co. and R. H. White & Co., and they played nine innings to a 16–16 tie, stopping so the teams could catch the last boat back to Boston, before about 300 spectators on the Sea Foam House balconies. The Boston papers split on the light — the Post praised it, the Transcript found it insufficient, the Globe called the experiment a failure — and the fielders, unable to judge fly balls in the glare, let them bounce before fielding them. Fort Wayne's own first attempt keeps its footnote: one baseball-history researcher has called the rained-out Fort Wayne–Indianapolis billing of 29–30 May 1883 the first scheduled night game involving a major-league team; it was never played as billed.

Added sources: SABR, “Under the Lights,” Baseball Research Journal (1980); 19cbaseball.com, Hull 1880 account; ESPN baseball-history research on the 1883 billing

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