Great Depression’s Impact on Baseball Finances

In January, the New York Times looked back at how the Depression affected attendance in Major League Baseball.  While attendance did drop, baseball handled the economic pains of the time better than most industries.  It seems like a similar thing is true today.

A few weeks later, Dave Rouleau at The Biz of Baseball wrote up a good report emphasizing that looked at different opinions on how national economic health affected attendance, but then concluded that baseball had shielded its financial health to a pretty good degree by emphasizing revenue streams other than ticket sales.

I’m not sure how much stock I put in the various historical comparisons to ticket sales during economic downturns.  There are so many different factors in play – significance of sports in American’s lives, population (it’s a lot easier to get 40,000 people out of 3 million to do something than it is to get 40,000 out of 250,000), increased emphasis on season tickets and people’s desire to hold onto seniority, other leisure activity options available, etc., that I’m not sure any of the studies referenced in the linked articles are really worth that much.  Still, they are interesting and worth checking out.