#GoingDeep: The Forgotten History of Numbering Players

In late 1906, a dozen years after Hart’s numbering plan, Charles Murphy, the new owner of the Cubs, revived the idea. This time, however, the suggestion gained a foothold, though not initially in Chicago and not by physically placing numbers on uniforms. Instead, cost-conscious team magnates concocted a new scheme that, not surprisingly, aided profits.

Eliminating the time and money required to add numerals to the sleeves or backs of jerseys, the new plan entailed printing a unique number next to each player’s name in the scorecards sold at the park and displaying these numbers in lineups posted on new-fangled electric scoreboards. This meant that to decode the numbering system, fans had to purchase a scorecard. And to top things off, wily owners would at times change these numbering assignments so that fans could not rely on the codes remaining the same each time they went to the ballpark, thus requiring them to buy new scorecards at every game they attended.

Newspaper reports from 1907 suggest that various American League clubs had already erected or planned to install new scoreboards that could handle this innovative numbering system. This included a new scoreboard at Boston’s Huntington Grounds, then the home of the Red Sox, that quickly garnered a modicum of criticism. The Altoona Tribune of May 25, 1907, griped that “Boston’s electric score board is a frost. When the balls and strike [sic] sign is working properly the batter sign on the other end makes a few changes not on the programme.” Just a few weeks later , longtime baseball writer Sy Sanborn of the Chicago Tribune grumbled that “the electric score board installed at the Huntington avenue grounds is a distinct failure.”

Despite initial hiccups, the scoreboard/scorecard numbering scheme flourished. By 1911, electronic scoreboards using the coding system were found at big league parks such as Boston’s South End Grounds, Cleveland’s League Park, Detroit’s Bennett Park, Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, Washington’s National Park, and both of Chicago’s big league fields: West Side Grounds and White Sox Park.

Most of these scoreboards were likely manufactured by the World Score Board and Advertising Company, a Chicago-based firm that had acquired the patents of a local electrician George Baird in 1909 or 1910. Baird’s patent papers described how the devise featured various plates that:

… bear numerals. This is especially advantageous in the case of batters. The numerals may readily be made of a sufficiently large size to be distinguished readily from all the distant portions of a base-ball ground, whereas names upon the plates could not be read except from close at hand. The numbers employed will correspond with those assigned to the players in a printed or other list of the players supplied for the guidance of the audience, as for instance upon the usual score-cards or score-sheets which are employed for keeping record of the game.

This early method of numbering players can be found in old scorecards that feature printed numbers next to player names, as well as explanations as to how fans could make the connection between the players, the numbers and the scoreboard. The Hall of Fame’s archives includes numerous such scorecards.