1940's Baseball

[Fading Fast]

I had a similar experience back in the early '90s in Toronto when I was in town and, by chance, Doug Flutie was in town for a CFL game. I bought tickets at face (reasonable, but don't remember how much now) at the stadium right before kickoff and enjoyed seeing him play and the Skydome Stadium - cool for its day.

I think that the secondary market is part of it, in that is makes it possible for more people to buy tickets as they don't have to plan as far in advance, don't have to be plugged into the official channel to buy tickets and they don't have to gamble with the scalpers outside the stadium (i.e., Stubhub is a safe, legal and convenient way to shop for and buy tickets), but I wonder if that creates enough demand to account for the exponential increase in prices. At the end of the day, the scalpers could only make money if the demand existed or they wouldn't buy them up at face in the first place. So, clearly the demand is there - I just wonder where it came from to drive prices so high (maybe it is all the convenience of the secondary market, but my instinct says something else is also driving it).

 

[LizzieMaine]

Attendance by any metric is much higher now than it was in the Era, there's no question about that. When the Dodgers pulled over 1.8 million into Ebbets Field -- seating capacity just a dite under 32,000 -- in 1947, that amounted to an average of about 23,000 per game. Observers said that record would never be broken, but it was, just a few years later by the Milwaukee Braves, who drew over well over 2 million a year during their glory days in the mid-fifties. And *that* was a record which would "never be broken."

But nowadays, a team drawing 2 million a year is in the middle of the pack, and a team drawing 1.8 million starts pleading poverty.

I think one thing driving the kind of attendance figures you get now are a lot of the things I thoroughly dislike about going to ballgames today -- the carnival/theme park atmosphere, the "gourmet restaurants," the capering costumed mascots, and other excrecenses of that sort. If you went to Ebbets Field in 1947 or to Fenway Park in 1970, you got one thing, and one thing only: a baseball game. There was organ music between innings, or maybe the Brooklyn Sym-Phony Band, but in general the focus was on the field. If you went under the stands you experienced damp, smelly concrete, not a shopping mall, and if you were hungry your menu choices were limited to hot dogs, ice cream, popcorn, peanuts, soda, or beer. That sort of atmosphere was fine for the working-class fanbase that made up the bulk of support for baseball in the Era. Today, you get more of the upscale family outing crowd. It's an event, and the emphasis is as much the "experience" as it is the game, which leads to the spectacle of a sold-out park at the start of the game, and half the seats empty by the seventh inning.

The teams argue they have no choice but to market in this way due to the excessive salaries paid the players, but you could argue in return that gate receipts are a much smaller part of the total picture than they were in the Era. The Dodgers in 1947 had a surprisingly small-scale radio contract, and their games were only broadcast on a single station in Metropolitan New York. And they earned a negligible amount for the games they televised that year -- the gate, and what they could make renting their ballpark out for football or exhibitions of various kinds, was all they had to go on, period. Nowadays, teams are driven largely by television contracts, receive huge sums for licensed merchandise, and gate receipts, while important, are far from being the most important item on the bottom line.

I think the inevitable end result of this is the weird situation we see developing today. Attendance is stronger than it's ever been -- but fewer and fewer Americans actually *care* about baseball the way they did in the Era. The teams are following football's example and marketing the experience, and not the sport itself -- which will, eventually, I fear, be the downfall of the whole institution.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I suspect a lot of that is the expansion of the "secondary market." When I was going to games in the 70s there was no such thing as Stub Hub or anything like that -- you either bought your tickets for face value at the window or by mail, or you got them from the "who needs em whos got em" guy standing in the stairway at the Kenmore subway station. But now, it seems like speculators buy up huge blocks of face-value tickets right when they go on sale and then jack them up for resale online.

This is a big part of it. I remember a few years ago when the Cubs got busted for scalping their own tickets. It's not that bad everywhere though, at least not yet, but certainly is in high dollar markets such as NY, BOS and CHI.

And to FF's point about concerts...a few years ago my wife and I went to see a (mostly) reunited Van Halen (Eddie was reported to be sober, and when he's on his game, he has few equals in the rock guitar world). I ended up paying $125 a pop for tickets, plus another $30 for parking at the arena. I had to break out my ticket stub from 1984 when I skipped school to go buy tickets. The cost? $8.25, which included the 25 cents for parking. Now why in the world were tickets to what was essentially a bunch of middle aged guys doing an oldies tour 200 times more expensive? Because people like me now have more money than sense and are willing to pay outrageous prices to recreate our youth. Same thing with baseball.

On a side note...I'm a bit of a FL heretic in that I'm not particularly interested in dressing or acting "vintage", but I think it would be awesome to go to a baseball games dressed in a suit and tie, wearing a fedora, chomping on a big cigar and yelling "you bums!"

 

[LizzieMaine]

They used to sell these straw fedoras at Fenway --

You'd always see them worn by chubby middle-aged, red-faced Irishmen in too-tight polo shirts with big sweat stains under the arms. An unforgettable image from my childhood.

 

[HudsonHawk]

They used to sell these straw fedoras at Fenway --

You'd always see them worn by chubby middle-aged, red-faced Irishmen in too-tight polo shirts with big sweat stains under the arms. An unforgettable image from my childhood.

Hmmm..how high is the crown? Is that a 2 3/8 inch or 2 1/2 inch brim? And the ribbon is way off...

 

[Fading Fast]

Lizzie, I agree with everything you said - right down to having lived in Boston and understanding your Irishman comment - but I question if it will be death of the institution. Football is thriving. That said, I do worry about baseball as my anecdotal evidence is that schools and communities are shoving soccer down kids throats the way baseball used to be, so, will there be a next generation coming up to be a fan base?

And HH, back when I was living in Boston in the '90s, my girlfriend and I were invited to a dinner party for a friend's birthday at a nice restaurant, but we wanted to go to the Sox games first and wouldn't have time to change. So, there we were at Fenway, I had on a sport coat, tie, dress slacks, my girlfriend was in a skirts, linen blouse ...you get the picture. Well guess what, they put us on the Jumbotron, my guess, 'cause we were about the only idiots dressed up for a Saturday day game.

And enjoyed the game way more than the dinner party.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The question, though, is *football* thriving? Or is the "football experience" what's thriving? Many millions of people will watch the Super Blow next week -- but how many of them actually understand the intricacies the game itself, how many are actually emotionally invested in the outcome of the contest? How many, on the other hand, are just watching because it's the thing to do -- if the Boys hyped up a World Championship of Cockfighting and got Justin Bieber to sing the national anthem and Lady Gaga to be the Pit Girl, and all the big companies competed to put their commercials on it, would there really be any difference? Does the *game* really matter anymore?

As far as ballpark attire is concerned, I think you can pinpoint the moment when it really changed to what it is now to the early eighties -- when teams started to sell licensed copies of "game jerseys." While you could buy a Red Sox t-shirt at Fenway during my childhood, these only came in children's sizes, and there was simply no such thing as a fan-wear team jersey. The only way anyone could get one was to swipe it out of the clubhouse laundry basket. It was unheard of to see an adult wearing an official team jersey on the street, or in the stands, because they simply didn't exist as retail items. But when MLB signed a new contract with a uniform supplier in the '80s, part of the deal was that "official" jerseys would be sold at retail, at a very high markup -- and all of a sudden every 50-year-old beer belly was showing up in the park in a team jersey. We see the results before us.

You could, however, get a souvenir cap at the ballpark as far back as the mid-forties -- the Cubs were the first team to sell these, and the idea caught on fast. By the middle of the fifties, fans could even order genuine on-field caps from the company that sold them to the teams -- these were sold for many years in little ads in the back pages of the Sporting News. ("KM Pro! The Cap That Major Leaguers Wear!") It was quite an exciting thing when a kid in my neighborhood showed up with one -- it cost him all of $8, an astronomical sum, and it made all of us in our cheap felt souvenir caps feel like rabble.

 

[Fading Fast]

No doubt, there are a lot more casual fans for both baseball and football - and I'd agree with the '80s being the start of the turn, but it seems to have really ramped in the last 15 years. However, at least for football, there is incredible passion about each game (I agree, the Super Bowl is a spectacle with a game somewhere tucked inside) and a large core fan base that seems very knowledgable. In my anecdotal experience, Monday mornings during football season in many offices are devoted to dissecting the local teams play at a level that would impress some coaches. Oddly and sadly, much less of that passion and knowledge seems to exist for baseball (like it did when I was growing up and like it does for football). To emphasize, that is based on nothing more that what I experience in my small world.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Football has obviously done a lot more than baseball in terms of marketing the non-game aspects to casual fans. The hype that is the Super Bowl, fantasy football, all the "events" associated with the game...they've convinced people that you don't have to care about the teams or even the game to have an interest in it. It's harder with baseball, though the certainly try. Personally, I'm ok that there are fewer casual fans of baseball, though I recognize that it's the casual fan that makes the world go around. If baseball had to rely on the hard core fan who cares about his team, they'd be out of business.

 

[TimeWarpWife]

As far as I'm concerned, football died on January 27, 1980, when Cowboys' legendary quarterback Roger Staubach walked off the field after playing in the Pro Bowl. This was the last game he played in and football has not been the same since. Back in those days players had to have jobs during the off season because they weren't making the mega-millions a year and signing bonuses players do now. IMO, all professional sports are nothing but big conglomerate money-making businesses. There's no player loyalty to a team anymore because every player is willing to play for whichever team will pay him the most. I haven't watched a professional game of any sport in years and have no plans to watch the hugely hyped 50th Super Bowl. Even the Olympics is mostly about winners signing up with advertising companies for millions of dollars. Is anything not about money and fame anymore? Sorry for getting off topic about 1940s baseball, it's just I have very strong feelings against football these days. Btw, Lizzie, I see why you're so hard on the boys from marketing - there isn't much they don't have their greedy little hands in anymore.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There's a lot of talk that the big-money era started in baseball with free agency, but that was the end of a progression that had begun with the sharp increase in amateur signing bonuses during the postwar era. The increase in attendance during the postwar era -- every team except the St. Louis Browns was showing a profit in 1947-49 -- meant a lot money rattling around the pockets of owners, and they threw huge wads of it at talented high-school boys.

Some of these gambles paid off -- Al Kaline signed with the Tigers right out of high school in 1953 for $35,000, Harmon Killebrew, also an 18-year-old, signed for $50,000 with the Senators in 1954, Sandy Koufax got a comparatively piddling $14,000 out of Walter O'Malley in 1955, and Carl Yastrzemski signed with the Red Sox in 1958 for $108,000. And those were just the biggest stars -- even mickey-mouse utility infielders were signing for five figure bonuses at a time when Joe Punchpress was happy to make $3000 a year.

The dark side of this was that those same Mr. Generosity owners could be brutal in dealing with the players when they started to slip. Carl Furillo, for years a rock-solid outfielder with the Dodgers, was unceremoniously given his unconditional release in 1960, while he was injured. He argued this was a violation of his contract and sued, ended up winning the case -- and Walter O'Malley saw to it that he was blackballed from baseball. He spent the rest of his life working in blue-collar jobs around New York and died deeply embittered over what had happened. Hell of an ending for one of the greatest right fielders of his generation.

 

[HudsonHawk]

As far as I'm concerned, football died on January 27, 1980, when Cowboys' legendary quarterback Roger Staubach walked off the field after playing in the Pro Bowl. This was the last game he played in and football has not been the same since. Back in those days players had to have jobs during the off season because they weren't making the mega-millions a year and signing bonuses players do now. IMO, all professional sports are nothing but big conglomerate money-making businesses. There's no player loyalty to a team anymore because every player is willing to play for whichever team will pay him the most. I haven't watched a professional game of any sport in years and have no plans to watch the hugely hyped 50th Super Bowl. Even the Olympics is mostly about winners signing up with advertising companies for millions of dollars. Is anything not about money and fame anymore? Sorry for getting off topic about 1940s baseball, it's just I have very strong feelings against football these days. Btw, Lizzie, I see why you're so hard on the boys from marketing - there isn't much they don't have their greedy little hands in anymore.

As Ty Cobb said in 1925: "The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that's it".

Professional baseball (and football for that matter) has always been only about money. Money is the only reason it was created in the first place.

 

[LizzieMaine]

You can pretty much view the entire history of major league baseball as an ongoing battle between capital -- the owners -- and labor -- the players. In 1890 there was even an actual revolution -- players who belonged to the first professional sports labor union, "The Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players," jumped the established leagues en masse to form the "Players' League," which was owned and controlled by the players themselves and which eliminated the most onerous aspects of what was then the standard players' contract: the "reserve clause," which bound a player to his team for life unless that team chose to trade or release him, or sell him like a piece of meat.

The PL collapsed after a single season due largely to oversaturation of the market -- they were competing against two other major leagues in several cities, and there just wasn't enough fan support to go around. After the members of the Brotherhood were reabsorbed into the established leagues, conditions got even tougher. You can draw a direct line from the Brotherhood in 1890 to the Mexican League affair of 1946, to Curt Flood in 1969, and Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally in 1975, because the issues involved were exactly the same.

The reserve clause was a unique thing to baseball -- no other form of the entertainment industry ever had anything like it. A vaudeville star who signed with the Keith-Albee Circuit was perfectly free to take a better deal from Shubert once that contract ran out. If a movie star didn't like the deal she was getting from Columbia she was free to sign with Warner Bros. when her contract ran out. But a baseball player didn't have that choice -- if Chick Gandil thought he was getting a raw deal from Charles Comiskey, he had only two options: take what he was offered or quit baseball. Or, become an outlaw and throw the World Series.

Interestingly, the Negro Leagues, since they operated outside the control of "Organized Baseball," didn't have the reserve clause in their contracts. Consequently, it was common for Negro League players to float from team to team depending on who would pay them the most, much like the "free agent" market today, and some of the best players were making excellent money between their league wages and independent barnstorming tours. Satchel Paige was earning around $50,000 a year by the late forties -- within breathing distance of Joe DiMaggio's major-league-leading salary of $65,000 -- and actually took an enormous pay cut when he was signed by the Cleveland Indians in 1948.

 

[HudsonHawk]

The problem with challenging the reserve clause was that professional baseball was unlike any other form of entertainment out there. While each club was its own entity, it couldn't operate completely independently of the other clubs. Was each franchise an independent corporation or were they effectively branches of the same? When it came time to answer the questions, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the U.S. Supreme Court punted (sorry to mix sports metaphors). They didn't really know how to resolve the issue so they simply ignored it, ultimately forcing it to a head 50 years later. Unfortunately, our judiciary has a long history of such (see slavery and The War, Civil).

 

[Fading Fast]

Morally, I am fully in favor of players having freedom to shop their skills to the best opportunity and I would fight with them to achieve or keep that right. (As an aside, I believe college players - at least at schools where football is a true money making business - should be able to negotiate pay for themselves.) What is unfortunate is that once they gained that right (not absolutely, but made significant gains) in baseball and football, the result for the fan - or at least this fan - has been that the sport lost some of its appeal as teams don't feel as real anymore.

When players were wrongly tied to teams, the teams stayed reasonably the same from year to year, trades were infrequent, young players matured and developed before the hometown fans and they felt like Yankees or Redsox or Dodgers, etc. The players felt like "your" guys, "our" team and you knew the full arc of their professional careers. Now, as salary caps, free agency, etc. have many players regularly switching teams, to me, teams don't feel like much more than a collection of guys who for money decided to play together this year.

My enjoyment of sports and my sense of loyalty to a team dropped meaningfully as this happened. I now watch sports for the join of seeing highly skilled players compete, but I don't have a strong sense of "my" team anymore. Growing up, we were a "Giants Household" - not a "Jets Household." I knew all the players on the Giants roster and their history. I cared about the Giants. Now I don't. As a New Yorker, I root for the Giants and Jets to win, but not passionately because, heck, the team will change next year, so, whatever.

This is one where I applaud the freedom of the players, but recognize that, for me, their rightful freedom reduced the joy of the sport. However, at least for football, it hasn't seem to have hurt the game's appeal at all, so I am clearly in the minority.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I can remember the moment when I learned the reality about pro sports -- October 12, 1970: the day after the Red Sox traded Tony Conigliaro to the Angels. I was in my best friend's kitchen, we were getting ready to walk to school, and there was a newspaper on the kitchen table folded open to the sports page. We noticed the article about the trade, and we both started to cry. Until that moment, I guess we'd assumed that players played together because they liked each other or something -- but when I saw that article about that trade, the whole illusion was shattered.

From that moment forward, I realized an important thing -- I was, essentially, rooting for shirts, not for players, for the institution of a team rather than the players that made up that team. Players would come and players would go, but I still root for shirts today. It's not rational, but religion never is.

GO TEAM!!!!

 

[TimeWarpWife]

As Ty Cobb said in 1925: "The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that's it".

Professional baseball (and football for that matter) has always been only about money. Money is the only reason it was created in the first place.

I did not know this and I stand corrected. I was just barely 19 in Jan. 1980, so I hadn't had enough time yet to become jaded, nor did I understand the fact that there isn't any team loyalty and most professional athletes will sell their souls to the highest bidder. Still, it's too horrifying a thought for me to believe Roger Staubach would have ever played for the Washington Redskins.

 

[Harp]

... and most professional athletes will sell their souls to the highest bidder...

After the Cubs fell to the Mets bullpen last season I realized that Chicago's team was purely secular instead of spectacular for good reason.

 

[Harp]

Next on the list: The Selling of the Babe by Glenn Stout; and The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw; Christy Mathewson, and the NY Giants Created Modern Baseball.
Ruth and Mathewson are individually unique to the game and left their mark on the diamond.

 

[Fading Fast]

Next on the list: The Selling of the Babe by Glenn Stout; and The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw; Christy Mathewson, and the NY Giants Created Modern Baseball.
Ruth and Mathewson are individually unique to the game and left their mark on the diamond.

Saw good reviews for both of them and thought about getting one as it's always fun to read a baseball book around opening day.