Night Vision

Electric lighting arrived in Toronto one evening in 1879 when two steam-powered arc lights were turned on at McConkey’s restaurant on Yonge Street. According to historian Robert M. Stamp, McConkey’s celebrated by serving free ice cream late into the night. By 1881, the Canadian National Exhibition was illuminated and open past sundown. Soon, circuses, lawn bowling matches, cycling races, fights, soccer and rugby games, and other events were all staged under temporarily constructed lighting rigs. Yet, for more than three decades after it became practical, no baseball or softball games were played under flares in Toronto.

Baseball purists scoffed at the idea. Sports editors at the Globe and the Toronto Daily Star urged their readers to reject the idea. Legendary player Lou Gehrig told radio listeners that night games “are not really baseball” and “were strictly advantageous to the owners’ pocketbook.” Into the darkness stepped a group of pioneering young women who started taking swings under the stars and sold tickets to their spectacle.

Crowds in excess of two thousand paying customers were common at night games for the next four ladies softball seasons. The professional men of the 1934 pennant-winning Maple Leafs Baseball Club averaged just 1,793 fans at their day games. It would take another three years before amateur — and, later still, professional — male ballplayers played under lights in Toronto.

But there was no turning back. Owing to improving technologies, business necessities, and those pretty damsels of Sunnyside diamond fame, nighttime ball games were here to stay.