[Huge crowd of baseball fans watching baseball scoreboard during World Series game in New York City]

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Crowds packed into this scene, and the eye goes straight to the scoreboard that they are all facing. The 1911 Series pitted the New York Giants against the Philadelphia Athletics, and in an era before televised or radio broadcasts, a large board showing pitches, outs and runs was how thousands of fans followed the action in real time. The photograph was taken by Bain News Service, a commercial agency that sold pictures of current events to newspapers, so it captures how the Series was consumed by the public as much as the game itself. Look closely at the dense mass of hats and shoulders to get a sense of the scale of early twentieth-century baseball fandom.

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