Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression

Organized baseball has survived its share of difficult times, and never was the state of the game more imperiled than during the Great Depression. Or was it? Remarkably, during the economic upheavals of the Depression none of the sixteen Major League Baseball teams folded or moved. In this economist’s look at the sport as a business between 1929 and 1941, David George Surdam argues that although it was a very tough decade for baseball, the downturn didn’t happen immediately. The 1930 season, after the stock market crash, had record attendance. But by 1931 attendance began to fall rapidly, plummeting 40 percent by 1933. To adjust, teams reduced expenses by cutting coaches and hiring player-managers. While even the best players, such as Babe Ruth, were forced to take pay cuts, most players continued to earn the same pay in terms of purchasing power. Baseball remained a great way to make a living. Revenue sharing helped the teams in small markets but not necessarily at the expense of big-city teams. Off the field, owners devised innovative solutions to keep the game afloat, including the development of the Minor League farm system, night baseball, and the first radio broadcasts to diversify teams’ income sources. Using research from primary documents, Surdam analyzes how the economic structure and operations side of Major League Baseball during the Depression took a beating but managed to endure, albeit changed by the societal forces of its time.

Table of Contents:
Contents List of Tables 000 Acknowledgments 000 Introduction 000 Prologue: Clash of Titans 000 Part 1: The Financial Side of the Game 000 1. The American Economy and the State of Baseball Profits 000 2. Why Did Profits Collapse? The Revenue Side 000 3. Why Did Profits Collapse? Player Salaries and Other Expenses 000 4. Farm Systems 000 Conclusion of Economic Side Part 2: The Game on the Field 000 5. Competitive Balance 000 6. Player Movement 000 Part 3: Using League Rules to Aid in the Recovery 000 7. Helping the Indigent 000 8. Manipulating the Schedule to Increase Revenue 000 Part 4: Innovations to Boost Attendance and Profits 000 9. Radio and Baseball 000 10. Baseball Under the Lights 000 11. Other Innovations 000 12. How Effective Were the Innovations? 000 13. The Inept and the Restless: Franchise Relocation 000 Epilogue: The End of an Era 000 Appendix 1: Radio and Sunday Ball's Effect on Attendance 000 Appendix 2: Dramatis Personae 000 Appendix of Tables 000 Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000

About the Author :
David George Surdam is an associate professor of economics at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author of The Postwar Yankees: Baseball’s Golden Age Revisited (Nebraska 2008) and Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War.

Review :
"Surdam's book represents the best and probably the only solid study of major-league baseball's economic situation during the Depression."—Dorothy Seymour Mills, New York Journal of Books "With the American economy struggling, major-league baseball attendance falling for the fourth consecutive year and the Los Angeles Dodgers in bankruptcy, David George Surdam's Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats about the game's Depression-era troubles is certainly timely. Mr. Surdam, who teaches economics at the University of Northern Iowa, comes to his task armed with a fan's enthusiasm, an economist's tool kit and a certain dissatisfaction with previous analyses—including my own—of the evolution of the baseball business."—Henry D. Fetter, Wall Street Journal