The Postwar Yankees: Baseball's Golden Age Revisited

3. The Game on the Ledger

The dominance of the New York Yankees from 1921 through 1964 eventually weakened the American League on the field and in the stands. The Yankees’ almost monotonous success in the late 1940s through the mid-1960s exemplified the dangers of having a single team dominate the sport. The team’s supremacy was most deleterious to league attendance during its pennant runs between 1941 and 1964. Of course, the Yankees’ on-the-field superiority might not be the only factor explaining the league’s problems at the gate. Moreover, just because attendance fell during the early 1950s does not necessarily mean revenues and profits fell. Owners might have raised ticket prices or gained sufficiently increased television revenue to offset the shrinking attendance numbers. Owners might have used their bargaining leverage to drive down salaries. With these possibilities they might have maintained their profit levels. Was falling attendance, then, associated with falling profits and franchise values? If so, were owners caught in a squeeze between stagnant revenues and rising player salaries? To address the financial issues, I will rely primarily upon data presented to congressional hearings held in 1951 and 1957. As with all financial data pertaining to professional sports, one must maintain an air of skepticism, given the possibility of camouflaging revenue The Game on the Ledger Doldrums amid Prosperity 3 and profits while exaggerating costs. Given the forum in which the information was delivered, however, the data appear to be reasonably accurate. In the case of the Chicago White Sox financial data for 1956 presented during a probate court proceeding corroborated the data presented to Congress.1 Ticket Prices and New Ways of Marketing Tickets Could some of the diminution in attendance between 1946 and 1956 be attributed to rising ticket prices? Most of the increase in average ticket prices were offset by increases in the consumer price index (cpi). In the American League average real (adjusted for changes in the cpi) ticket prices generally increased by less than 10 percent. The average ticket price was obtained by dividing the team’s home revenue by home attendance. To this figure is added twenty-nine cents to account for the American League’s revenue-sharing plan. For most of the teams in 1955 the average ticket prices fell between the general admission and reserved ticket prices. Between 1946 and 1956 only the Athletics had greater than a 15 percent increase in real average ticket prices (see table 3.1 in the appendix). Some of the other teams had almost no increase over the period. Aside from the Athletics, then, rising real ticket prices probably explained only a modest proportion of the decrease in attendance figures. Several of the American League teams raised ticket prices during the late 1940s in the face of the attendance boom. Yet whether such increases were the chief culprits behind the later attendance decline is debatable. The Yankees and Red Sox did not hike ticket prices between 1949 and 1953, yet both teams witnessed similar proportional drops in attendance as other teams. By the mid-1950s ticket prices were relatively stable. According to published ticket prices listed in the Sporting News Baseball Dope, American League Red Book, and various team scorecards, no Major League team changed its ticket prices between 1955 and 1956. Nine teams continued to maintain their ticket prices between 1956 and 1957, including the New York Yankees. Table 3.2 shows ticket price changes during the postwar era (see appendix). 60 t The Game on the Ledger One possible reason for rising average ticket prices in the face of stagnant posted prices might have been reclassifying the seats or building new box and reserved seats. I did not find seating arrangements for 1946 through 1949. Between 1955 and 1964, however, such reclassifications were relatively small in the National League but more significant in the American League. In the National League Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cincinnati increased their numbers of box seats. The Reds reduced their general admission and bleacher sections; the other teams simply increased the number of box seats while maintaining the same numbers of other seats. In the American League Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and Kansas City increased their number of box seats. Cleveland had a large change, creating almost 3,600 more box seats and 7,000 general admission seats out of its reserved seating capacities (with a small...