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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.

This book analyzes and highlights the development and success of major league baseball teams in the National League and the American League, focusing on each team's performance and the extent to which each succeeded as a business enterprise despite competition for market share from other types of entertainment.

When Major League Baseball first expanded in 1961 with the addition of the Los Angeles Angels and the Washington Senators, it started a trend that saw the number of franchises almost double, from sixteen to thirty, while baseball attendance grew by 44 percent.

While some Latin American superstars have overcome discrimination to strike gold in baseball's big leagues, thousands more Latin American players never make it to The Show. Stealing Lives focuses on the plight of one Venezuelan teenager and documents abuses that take place against Latin children and young men as baseball becomes a global business. The authors reveal that in their efforts to secure cheap labor, Major League teams often violate the basic human rights of children. As a young boy growing up in Venezuela, Alexis Quiroz dreamed of playing in the Major Leagues. Alexis's dreams were like those of thousands of other boys in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, and Major League teams encouraged such dreams by recruiting Latin children as young as 10 and 11 years old. Determined to become a big league player, Alexis finished high school early and dedicated himself to landing a contract with a Major League team. Alexis signed with the Chicago Cubs in 1995 at age 17 and then began a harrowing ordeal of exploitation, mistreatment, and disrespect at the hands of the Chicago Cubs, including playing for the Cubs' Dominican Summer League team in appalling living conditions. Alexis's baseball career came to an abrupt end by an injury for which the Cubs provided no adequate medical treatment. The story continues, however, with Alexis's pursuit of justice in the United States to ensure that other Venezuelan and Dominican boys do not encounter similar experiences. What happened to Alexis is not an isolated case-Major League teams routinely deny Latin children and young men the basic protections that their U.S. counterparts take for granted. This exploitation violates international legal standards on labor standards and the human rights of children. Stealing Lives concludes by analyzing various reforms to redress the inequities big league baseball creates in its globalization.

Some professional athletes still face monopsony power in labor markets, underscoring the importance of estimating players’ marginal revenue product to assess its effects. We introduce two new empirical approaches, spline revenue functions and fixed-effects stochastic production functions, into the standard Scully (1974) approach to marginal revenue product estimation and calculate Monopsony Exploitation Ratios (MERs) for position players in Major League Baseball over the 2001–2011 seasons. Estimates indicate that MERs are about 0.89 for rookie players, 0.75 for arbitration eligible players, and 0.21 for free agents. Recent collective bargaining agreements have reduced MERs for free agents, but had no effect on MERs for other players.

Most sports fans consistently rely on the secondary ticket market. After all, the secondary ticket market provides fans with numerous benefits, including the opportunity to obtain tickets to sold out, high-profile events and the ability to resell tickets to recoup the cost of a ticket for an event they cannot attend. But some key players—namely, primary ticket sellers like sports teams—have lamented the rise of the secondary market, complaining that resale exchanges unfairly profit from the teams' labor and diminish the value of buying tickets directly from the teams. Consequently, teams have begun to develop new initiatives to curb the growth of the secondary market, including establishing official team resale exchanges to compete with sites like StubHub, prohibiting season ticket holders from selling tickets on unofficial resale exchanges, and implementing ticket delivery procedures that make it more difficult to resell tickets. Fortunately for teams, the law cuts squarely in their favor as courts, academics, and industry professionals alike adhere to the late nineteenth century notion of tickets as fully revocable licenses. As such, teams are free to impose resale restrictions as they see fit. But in this Comment, I argue that lawmakers should reconsider the extent to which teams can continue to use the revocable license rule to restrict ticket holders' resale rights. I show how the revocable license rule, though widely accepted today, was criticized and often rejected by early twentieth century courts and academics for seemingly allowing proprietors to unfairly and arbitrarily exclude innocent ticket-holding patrons. I then explain how business incentives nevertheless prevented proprietors from abusing the rule and how judges and lawmakers relied on the assumption that these incentives would prevent the rule from being abused. In doing so, I show that the rule was actually adopted for a very limited purpose—namely, to protect a proprietor's right to exclude unruly patrons. Given that limited purpose, I argue that courts and scholars have gradually—but improperly—extended the rule of tickets as revocable licenses such that primary ticket vendors now wield a type of unilateral power over ticket holders that the original proponents of the rule never intended to establish. Therefore, I urge that lawmakers stop allowing the notion of tickets as revocable licenses to inform the industry's discourse about ticket holders' rights. Finally, I explore various practical legislative solutions to reform the secondary market, which are free from the rigid assumptions of the revocable license rule and which account for the legitimate concerns of both ticket holders and teams.

This is the story of two great sports. One is \"America's game,\" while the other is \"the world's game.\" Baseball and soccer are both beloved cultural institutions. What draws fans to one game is often a mystery to fans of the other. Despite superficial differences, however, the business and culture of these sports share more in common than meets the eye. This is the first in-depth, cross-cultural comparison of these two great pastimes and the megabusinesses that they have become. In National Pastime,Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist illustrate how the different traditions of each sport have generated different possibilities for their commercial organization and exploitation. They pay special attention to the rich and complex evolution of baseball from its beginnings in America, and they trace modern soccer from its foundation in England through its subsequent expansion across the world. They illustrate how Victorian administrators laid the foundation for Major League Baseball (MLB) and soccer leagues such as the English Premier League, Italy's Serie A, and the European Champions League. The authors show how the organizers of baseball and soccer have learned from each other in the past and how they can continue to do so. Both sports are rich in tradition. In some cases, however, these traditions-often arbitrary rules established by long-defunct administrators-have obstructed the healthy development of the sport. By studying the experiences of other sports, it might be possible to develop new and better ways to operate. For example, soccer might benefit from greater cooperation among teams as in baseball. On the other hand, MLB could learn from soccer's relegation rules and more open system of ownership, thus avoiding some of the excesses (competitive imbalance, uneven team resources) associated with monopoly. National Pastime does not advocate the jettisoning of all tradition to adopt wholesale the approach of another sport, of course.

In 2007, the Mitchell Report shocked traditionalists who were appalled that drugs had corrupted the \"pure\" game of baseball. Nathan Corzine rescues the story of baseball's relationship with drugs from the sepia-toned tyranny of such myths. In Team Chemistry , he reveals a game splashed with spilled whiskey and tobacco stains from the day the first pitch was thrown. Indeed, throughout the game's history, stars and scrubs alike partook of a pharmacopeia that helped them stay on the field and cope off of it: In 1889, Pud Galvin tried a testosterone-derived \"elixir\" to help him pile up some of his 646 complete games. Sandy Koufax needed Codeine and an anti-inflammatory used on horses to pitch through his late-career elbow woes. Players returning from World War II mainstreamed the use of the amphetamines they had used as servicemen. Vida Blue invited teammates to cocaine parties, Tim Raines used it to stay awake on the bench, and Will McEnaney snorted it between innings. Corzine also ventures outside the lines to show how authorities handled--or failed to handle--drug and alcohol problems, and how those problems both shaped and scarred the game. The result is an eye-opening look at what baseball's relationship with substances legal and otherwise tells us about culture, society, and masculinity in America.

Feb. 26 -- Cuban diplomats travel to Washington on Friday for the latest round of normalization talks with U.S. officials - one topic that may not be high on the agenda is baseball. But in a week where the Boston Red Sox spent $60M dollars on a 19-year-old Cuban baseball player, the business of bringing young Cubans to play ball in the U.S. continues to thrive, as Willem Marx reports.