Did The Yankees Inflate Their Attendance In The 1930s?
Any insights?
Did The Yankees Inflate Their Attendance In The 1930s?
I ran across this claim by David Halberstam the other day:
This is actually the first time I’ve ever heard this claim.
I’m not aware of any evidence to indicate that Yankee Stadium attendance figures in the 1930s were inflated.
Halberstam is correct when he notes that the Yankees didn’t draw over a million fans every year. Here are the complete figures for the decade according to Ballparks of Baseball:
The second New York Giants entry should read “New York Yankees.”
But do we have any evidence that the Yankees numbers were inflated?
I’m not sure if we have any way to prove Halberstam either right or wrong. We could do a bit of spot checking, however.
For example, in 1933, the first year the Yankees attendance dropped to below 750,000, the biggest crowd at Yankee Stadium was 75,000 for a July 4 doubleheader. This figure comes from Baseball Reference’s numbers; I’m not sure what the source is.
As you can see, that 75,000 mark for that doubleheader is anything but exact. The boxscore listed the attendance as “only” 70,000.
In contrast, the Washington Evening Star reported the attendance at over 77,000:
My guess is that the more exact figure in the Washington D.C. paper is likely correct.
And, of course, I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t also share the cartoon in the Washington paper:
In contrast, the 1933 Yankees drew only 1,500 fans twice, according to Baseball Reference. Both small crowds came in early September games against the Tigers. The first was on September 11:
The Daily News didn’t bother printing the attendance for the September 12 game, which Baseball Reference also lists as 1,500:
The Detroit Free Press doesn’t offer us many more insights into that September 11 game, other than that the skies were pretty dark:
And, unfortunately, there’s not much more insight into that September 12 game:
You get the feeling that these end of season games were just a formality, which is probably why the attendance was so low. This, of course, despite the fact that the Yankees were in second place. Perhaps the absence of Babe Ruth contributed to the apathy.
This, though, is the biggest problem with Halberstam’s statement. There’s really no way to prove one way or another whether the Yankees were actually drawing large crowds in the 1930s. Unless we have copies of their internal accounting books, the best we can do is wade through old newspapers and sort of guess.
What do you think?
I think that three factors shaped attendance in the 1930's.
The biggest was the Great Depression. The nadir for the economy and unemployment was in 1933 when the unemployment rate reached 24.9%. Once the New Deal kicked in unemployment began to fall. By 1937, it had fallen by a bit more than 10 percentage points to 14.3%. At that point, FDR cut back on federal spending and unemployment rose to 19% in 1938. After that, FDR increased spending again both on New Deal domestic projects and preparations for World War II and by 1941 unemployment actually fell to just under 10%. To a large extent MLB attendance tracked with unemployment. It was lowest in 1933 and rose year-by-year throughout the decade.
A second factor shaped the attendance of individual teams. Not surprisingly in years that a team played well attendance was relatively high. When a team played poorly, attendance was relatively low. The Red Sox are a case in point. In 1932, their record was 43-111 and they finished in last place 64 games behind the first place Yankees. In 1933, they improved to 63-86 and they finished in 7th place 34.5 games behind the first place Senators. By 1934, Tom Yawkey had purchased the team obtained star players like Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, Wes Ferrell, Billy Werber, and Pinky Higgins. Later in the decade Bobby tand Ted Williams joined the team. While the Red Sox didn't win any pennants, they were competitive, usually won more games than they lost and finished in the upper half of the AL. As the team's fortunes improved along with the economy, their attendance also rose.
Finally, then, as now, market size mattered. Generally, teams in more populous cities such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit drew larger attendance than those in smaller markets.
Finally, in addition to the misprint conflating the Giants and Yankees, there is one involving the St.Louis Browns and Cardinals, both of which are shown with the same attendance in 1934. The Browns, as was usually the case during that period, actually had the lowest attendance in MLB in 1934 (115,305). in 1933 and 1935, the Browns drew less than 100 thousand for the entire season.
I'm not sure how relevant this is, but I recall the SF Giant announcers in the sixties regularly indicating that the AL announced paid attendance while the NL announced actual attendance. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Those numbers in your box scores and news articles look like estimates, e.g., 75,000 and 77,000.