Baseball's Greatest Season, 1924

3. The Business of Baseball

  ‫ﱛﱠﱛ‬ The Business of Baseball T HROUGHOUT its entire existence, organized baseball has been a branch of the entertainment business. By pulling that sentence apart and identifying the implications of each of its three key terms for the 1920s, we can understand the relationship of the general statement to the circumstances of the 1924 season. The key terms are organized, entertainment, and business, and I’ll approach them in reverse order. Baseball as a Business The men who owned baseball clubs in 1924 expected to make money from them. “In the baseball business,” Barney Dreyfuss, the Pirates owner, had explained several years earlier, “An owner must act quickly and secretly . . . . He must act on the jump and talk afterward.”1 The chief expense item for every major league baseball club was the payroll line: preeminently the salaries for players, but also the salaries for a field manager, a club secretary, several coaches, a trainer, a property manager, two to six scouts (“ivory hunters,” in the jargon of the day), and several office personnel (including at least an accountant and a public relations representative ).2 Team travel by Pullman car was also a major cost, especially for clubs that played in cities where games were still prohibited on Sunday.3 Then there were such items as the purchase of equipment, the maintenance of the playing facility, the staging of spring training, the acquisition of new players,4 and insurance premiums. Finally, since many teams had built new stadiums in the fifteen years prior to 1924, some owners were still paying debt service. • 30 • How large were these costs? Although major league teams were not obliged to open their books to public scrutiny, happy accident provides us with occasional glimpses into their finances. We know, for example, that in 1925 the payroll of the free-spending New York Yankees came to $370,000, tops in the majors, while at the other end of the scale, the payroll of the St. Louis Browns barely exceeded $100,000. As a proportion of costs, payrolls probably constituted between 35 percent and 40 percent of total expenses in 1924. Spring training amounted to almost 10 percent of the expenditures on an average team. The compensation and travel costs of scouts accounted for approximately the same proportion . Even the balls that the game was played with rose to visibility as an expense item, costing each team over $3,000 per year.5 All of this is very rough, but we can venture the tentative conclusion that the total expenses of a team in 1924 amounted on average to $550,000, give or take $200,000.6 The money to pay for these expenses came preponderantly from gate receipts. Television did not exist in 1924, and although the first radio broadcast of a baseball game had occurred in 1921, no club had yet sold the right to transmit descriptions of games. Clubs had a few other standard ways to make money: concession sales (food, drink, scorecards),7 exhibition games, rentals of facilities (during road trips), and parking fees. But with ticket sales accounting for over 85 percent of the revenues of the average club, it is clear that these other areas of income-production, though worth cultivating and expanding, were not make-or-break categories of revenue.8 Nevertheless, because major league attendance rose to unprecedented levels in the early 1920s, reaching 9.5 million for the exciting 1924 season, gate revenues sufficed for most owners, with profits for most clubs ranging from 10 percent to 25 percent of gross operating income.9 These were strong returns, and although perhaps only Charles Comiskey of the Chicago White Sox and Frank Navin of the Detroit Tigers actually got rich from baseball, only two clubs—the Boston Red Sox, owned by Harry Frazee and then by Robert Quinn, and the Philadelphia Phillies, owned by William Baker—stood outside the general prosperity of the era. With gate receipts looming so large, much attention was given to identifying the factors that encouraged and sustained strong ticket sales. Two unsurprising considerations were paramount: the quality of the playing of a team and the size of the population pool from which a team could T B  B • 31 • draw support. It is, of course, simple common sense to note that a good team outdraws a poor team. But the effect on receipts of changes in quality of play could be...