Night baseball emerged as a proposed way to boost attendance because summer afternoon games were uncomfortably hot and many working people could not attend weekday day games. Although several exhibition games under lights had been played between 1880 and 1930, organized baseball, defined as Major League Baseball and its associated minor league teams, regarded them as novelty experiments, and critics warned of lost sleep, indigestion, more player injuries, and eye damage. During the Great Depression, when attendance at professional sporting events declined, Marvin L. Truby, president of the Independence Baseball Club in 1930, argued that night baseball would improve attendance. Lights for Producer Park were purchased from the Giant Manufacturing Company of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and mounted on sixty-foot steel pipe towers. By buying lights and installing them on its home field, an organized baseball team made an unprecedented commitment to night baseball. On April 28, 1930, Independence hosted the first night game in the history of organized baseball, when the Independence Producers lost to the Muskogee Chiefs 13-3.