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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.
A history of baseball as a sport and business during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the game on and off the field and tracing its development within the broader contours of American history.
Babe Ruth was 40 and flabby in 1935. His days as a strapping, fearsome home run hitter were behind him. Baseball had flourished into big business through Ruth's swing and swag and didn't need him anymore. His dream was to become a manager but the New York Yankees--a dynasty he helped build--were not interested. But someone wanted him. Judge Emil Fuchs, luckless president of the Boston Braves, had lost a fortune on his perpetually losing team. Desperate to save the club from collapse, he needed Babe Ruth--not the fading slugger but the most famous brand on the planet. This book chronicles the Ruth and Fuchs partnership during a perplexing 1935 season with the 38-115 Braves--truly one of the worst baseball teams in history--along with Ruth's final games, back in the city where he debuted.
As the 1919 World Series scandal simmered throughout the 1920 season, tight pennant races drove attendance to new peaks and presaged a decade of general prosperity for baseball. Babe Ruth shattered his own home-run record and, buoyed by a booming economy, professional sports enjoyed what sportswriters termed a "Golden Age of Sports." Throughout the tumultuous 1920s, Major League Baseball remained a mixture of competition and cooperation. Teams could improve by player trades, buying Minor League stars, or signing untried youths. Players and owners had their usual contentious relationship, with owners maintaining considerable control over their players. Owners adjusted the game so that the 1920s witnessed a surge in slugging and a diminution in base stealing, and they provided a better ballpark experience by both improving their stadiums and minimizing disruptions by rowdy fans. However, they hesitated to adapt to new technologies such as radio, electrical lighting, and air travel. The Major Leagues remained an enclave for white people, while African Americans toiled in the newly established Negro Leagues, where salaries and profits were skimpy. By analyzing the economic and financial aspects of Major League Baseball, The Age of Ruth and Landis shows how baseball during the 1920s experienced both strife and prosperity, innovation and conservatism. With figures such as the incomparable Babe Ruth, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Tris Speaker, and Eddie Collins, the decade featured an exciting brand of livelier baseball, new stadiums, and overall stability.
From the team’s inception in 1903, the New York Yankees were a floundering group that played as second-class citizens to the New York Giants. With four winning seasons to date, the team was purchased in 1915 by Jacob Ruppert and his partner, Cap “Til” Huston. Three years later, when Ruppert hired Miller Huggins as manager, the unlikely partnership of the two figures began, one that set into motion the Yankees’ run as the dominant baseball franchise of the 1920s and the rest of the twentieth century, capturing six American League pennants with Huggins at the helm and four more during Ruppert’s lifetime. The Yankees’ success was driven by Ruppert’s executive style and enduring financial commitment, combined with Huggins’s philosophy of continual improvement and personnel development. While Ruppert and Huggins had more than a little help from one of baseball’s greats, Babe Ruth, their close relationship has been overlooked in the Yankees’ rise to dominance. Though both were small of stature, the two men nonetheless became giants of the game with unassailable mutual trust and loyalty. The Colonel and Hug tells the story of how these two men transformed the Yankees. It also tells the larger story about baseball primarily in the tumultuous period from 1918 to 1929—with the end of the Deadball Era and the rise of the Lively Ball Era, a gambling scandal, and the collapse of baseball’s governing structure—and the significant role the Yankees played in it all. While the hitting of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig won many games for New York, Ruppert and Huggins institutionalized winning for the Yankees.
Night games transformed the business of professional baseball, as the smaller, demographically narrower audiences able to attend daytime games gave way to larger, more diversified crowds of nighttime spectators. Many ball club owners were initially conflicted about artificial lighting and later actually resisted expanding the number of night games during the sport's struggle to balance ballpark attendance and television viewership in the 1950s. This first-ever comprehensive history of night baseball examines the factors, obstacles and trends that shaped this dramatic change in both the minor and major leagues between 1930 and 1990.
Between 1951 and 1989, Congress held a series of hearings to investigate the antitrust aspects of professional sports leagues. Among the concerns: ownership control of players, restrictions on new franchises, territorial protection, and other cartel-like behaviors. In The Big Leagues Go to Washington, David Surdam chronicles the key issues that arose during the hearings and the ways opposing sides used economic data and theory to define what was right, what was feasible, and what was advantageous to one party or another. As Surdam shows, the hearings affected matters as fundamental to the modern game as broadcasting rights, player drafts and unions, league mergers, and the dominance of the New York Yankees. He also charts how lawmakers from the West and South pressed for the relocation of ailing franchises to their states and the ways savvy owners dodged congressional interference when they could and adapted to it when necessary.
American living standards improved considerably between 1900 and 2000. While most observers focus on gains in per-capita income as a measure of economic well-being, economists have used other measures of well-being: height, weight, and longevity. The increased amount of leisure time per week and across people's lifetimes, however, has been an unsung aspect of the improved standard of living in America. In Century of the Leisured Masses, David George Surdam explores the growing presence of leisure activities in Americans' lives and how this development came out throughout the twentieth century. Most Americans have gone from working fifty-five or more hours per week to working fewer than forty, although many Americans at the top rungs of the economic ladder continue to work long hours. Not only do more Americans have more time to devote to other activities, they are able to enjoy higher-quality leisure. New forms of leisure have given Americans more choices, better quality, and greater convenience. For instance, in addition to producing music themselves, they can now listen to the most talented musicians when and where they want. Television began as black and white on small screens; within fifty years, Americans had a cast of dozens of channels to choose from. They could also purchase favorite shows and movies to watch at their convenience. Even Americans with low incomes enjoyed television and other new forms of leisure. This growth of leisure resulted from a combination of growing productivity, better health, and technology. American workers became more productive and chose to spend their improved productivity and higher wages by consuming more, taking more time off, and enjoying better working conditions. By century's end, relatively few Americans were engaged in arduous, dangerous, and stultifying occupations. The reign of tyranny on the shop floor, in retail shops, and in offices was mitigated; many Americans could even enjoy leisure activities during work hours. Failure to consider the gains in leisure time and leisure consumption understates the gains in American living standards. With Century of the Leisured Masses, Surdam has comprehensively documented and examined the developments in this important marker of well-being throughout the past century.
Bursting onto the scene as a 20-year-old rookie, Arky Vaughan quickly established himself as the next great Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop. In 1935 his .385 batting average eclipsed even that of the immortal Honus Wagner, who was a steadying influence for Vaughan during his 10 seasons with the Pirates. Vaughan never hit under .300 with Pittsburgh and his versatility later made him an asset to the Brooklyn Dodgers. One of the quietest men in baseball, the nine-time All-Star eschewed the limelight but received plenty of attention for his on-field performance, for his one-man mutiny against Brooklyn manager Leo Durocher, and for walking away from the game to take care of his family and his beloved ranch during World War II. Drawing on dozens of articles, personal writings, recorded interviews and his daughter's unpublished biography, this book covers the life and career of an often overlooked Hall of Famer who died in a tragic boating accident at age 40.
Today's National Basketball Association commands millions of spectators worldwide, and its many franchises are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But the league wasn't always so successful or glamorous: in the 1940s and 1950s, the NBA and its predecessor, the Basketball Association of America, were scrambling to attract fans. Teams frequently played in dingy gymnasiums, players traveled as best they could, and their paychecks could bounce higher than a basketball. How did the NBA evolve from an obscure organization facing financial losses to a successful fledgling sports enterprise by 1960? Drawing on information from numerous archives, newspaper and periodical articles, and Congressional hearings, The Rise of the National Basketball Association chronicles the league's growing pains from 1946 to 1961. David George Surdam describes how a handful of ambitious ice hockey arena owners created the league as a way to increase the use of their facilities, growing the organization by fits and starts. Rigorously analyzing financial data and league records, Surdam points to the innovations that helped the NBA thrive: regular experiments with rules changes to make the game more attractive to fans, and the emergence of televised sports coverage as a way of capturing a larger audience. Notably, the NBA integrated in 1950, opening the game to players who would dominate the game by the end of the 1950sdecade: Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and Oscar Robertson. Long a game that players loved to play, basketball became a professional sport well supported by community leaders, business vendors, and an ever-growing number of fans.