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David George Surdam - Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression - 9780803234826 - V9780803234826
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Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression

€ 56.43
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Description for Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression hardcover. An economic history of baseball in America during the Great Depression. Num Pages: 448 pages, 38 tables. BIC Classification: 1KBB; 3JJG; WSJT. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 5487 x 3556 x 38. Weight in Grams: 703.

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 ... Read more

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. 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.

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Product Details

Format
Hardback
Publication date
2011
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press United States
Number of pages
448
Condition
New
Number of Pages
448
Place of Publication
Lincoln, United States
ISBN
9780803234826
SKU
V9780803234826
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-21

About David George Surdam
David George Surdam is an associate professor of economics at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author of Run to Glory and Profits (Nebraska, 2013) and The Postwar Yankees: Baseball’s Golden Age Revisited (Nebraska, 2008).

Reviews for Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression
“Surdam’s book represents the best and probably the only solid study of major-league baseball’s economic situation during the Depression.”—Dorothy Seymour Mills, New York Journal of Books “With the American economy struggling, major-league baseball attendance falling for the fourth consecutive year and the Los Angeles Dodgers in bankruptcy, David George Surdam’s Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats about the game's Depression-era troubles ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression


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