Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about baseball and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the baseball urban legends featured so far.

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: Ernie Banks was the first TV image broadcast from the United States to Europe.

Sadly, Ernie Banks, one of the greatest baseball players of all-time, passed away Friday night at the age of 83. Known as “Mr. Cub,” Banks played 19 seasons for the Chicago Cubs, winning two MVPs (he’s part of one of my favorite baseball trivia questions ever – “There is a back-to-back MVP at every position on the diamond. Can you name them all?” Banks, of course, won his two at shortstop) and making fourteen All-Star teams (Banks played during the four-year period where there were two All-Star seasons per season, so Banks’ 14 All-Star appearances came in 11 different seasons). Reader Joshua P. wanted to know about an interesting legend involving Banks – was he really the first human to appear in a TV broadcast across the Atlantic from the United States to Europe?

Read on to find out!

In 1962, the first satellite designed to transmit television signals from the United States to Europe was launched. Dubbed Telstar, it was built by AT&T (in a sort of partnership with NASA, as NASA had a monopoly at the time for launching things into outer space in the United States). The satellite was such a sensation at the time that a British rock group, The Tornadoes, had a hit instrumental song dubbed “Telstar”…

The satellite was launched into orbit on July 10, 1962. 13 days later, the satellite was ready to have its first television performance. The satellite would only be in position for a little under 20 minutes a day. The first thing it broadcast at all to Europe was an image of the AT&T base for Telstar in Andover, Maine.

On July 23, the French transmitted a performance of their superstar singer Yves Montand (Montand was born in Italy but became a French citizen after becoming a star in France)…
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The British broadcast just a couple of their officials saying hello.

The United States planned on broadcasting part of a press conference of President John F. Kennedy. They eventually did just that, but Kennedy wasn’t ready when their time came, so the U.S. side of the feed (anchored by CBS’s Walter Cronkite and NBC’s Chet Huntley) had to fill the time – their back-up plan was to broadcast a game between the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies!

Bob Vorwald had a great article last year at WGN.com about the broadcast.

The Cubs announcer Jack Brickhouse opened the broadcast (as the PA system let the fans know that the game was now being broadcast in Europe):

“Well, we realize that all this doesn’t make sense to you folks in Europe, but if we hadn’t shown you a bit of our national game on this first transatlantic show, we’d have never heard the end of it. As a matter of fact right now our colleagues who are doing the translating are going crazy trying to say runs, hits, and errors in Swedish and Italian. Anyway, here it is – a brief glimpse of American baseball played in the biggest arena in the world. All the way from Wrigley Field in Chicago to the Colosseum in Rome.”

The game was picked up in the top of the third, with Philadelphia second baseman Tony Taylor hitting a fly ball off of pitcher Cal Koonce to Cub rightfielder George Altman. Altman later spoke of the attention he received from being on the broadcast:

“It was great. For me it was terrific because someone hit a ball to right field and I had to make a catch. Someone said you’re on world televised, you’re on world TV. People called and talked to me about that for a long time. They said ‘you’re famous all over the world!’”

The broadcast then cut to scenes from around the United States (including Washington D.C., Cape Canaveral and the Worlds Fair in Seattle) and Canada before finally going to Kennedy’s press conference.

A Wired article about the subject noted

President Kennedy was supposed to launch this historic moment in communications with a trans-Atlantic press conference, but the transmission signal was acquired before JFK was ready, so Ernie Banks may have been the first human image relayed across the Atlantic. Needing to kill a little time, the producers picked up a TV broadcast of a major league ballgame between the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago Cubs from Wrigley Field.

That article is likely the origin for the “Ernie Banks was the first human image relayed across the Atlantic” legend.

Banks was playing first base for the Cubs that day (1962 was his first season as a full-time first baseman after many years at shortstop) and he WAS briefly shown on the fly ball to right (as the camera quickly panned past first base to show the ball caught in right).

Here is the snippet of the game shown…

But really, the honor of the first human broadcast across the Atlantic is a joint award belonging to Cal Koonce, but mostly Tony Taylor!

The legend is…

STATUS: I’m Going With False

Thanks to Bob Vorwald for the great article!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future urban legends columns! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com