Digging Into the 1900 Cincinnati Reds Finances
It's amazing what you can find in old newspapers
Digging Into the 1900 Cincinnati Reds Finances
The 1900 Cincinnati Reds were a team in trouble.
You might remember from this article that a big chunk of League Park burned down in late May 1900. That set off a fascinating war of words, as The Cincinnati Enquirer criticized club president John T. Brush at every opportunity.
See, for example, these two articles from about a week after the fire:
In case you didn’t want to wade through all of that, here’s the gist:
Cincinnati’s uniforms burned in the fire.
Club management demanded that the players purchase their own new uniforms.
The players countered with an accusation that the fire was Brush’s fault.
Seeing no way out, the Cincinnati management asked if they could use the Giants’ road uniforms.
New York’s management told them point blank that they could only have the uniforms if Cincinnati’s management agreed to pay for replacement uniforms for the game.
Eventually, the Reds were told that the players would have to play in their street clothes if a deal wasn’t made — and, finally, the New York road uniforms were handed over.
Unsurprisingly, the Reds started releasing players to try to cut down on other expenses.
Yeah — in other words, the money wasn’t exactly flowing in the right direction in Cincinnati.
The Rumor Mill
Oh - but it gets even better from that. This was printed just a few days later:
Brush would later have all sorts of interesting arrangements with John McGraw — but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here.
Look: there’s no question that the Reds were a bad club in 1900. I can’t blame Brush for wanting to improve his team. However, he apparently didn’t consider the optics of demanding that players buy their own uniforms after a fire, only to release handfuls of them and replace them with the most expensive stars he could find.
And then it gets even better. A local businessman offered to purchase the Reds outright:
I kind of wish that Fleischmann would have succeeded in buying the club — but that’s another story for another day.
Now, there were those who wanted to defend Brush:
However, you can still see a hint of sarcasm in this statement. Note that Brush was living in Indianapolis — and 1900 wasn’t exactly the era of jet travel.
As the summer went on, The Enquirer continued to point out Brush’s shortcomings, as did certain letters to the editor:
And, yes, there were letters to the editor in the sports section of The Enquirer back in 1900. I don’t think we’ll ever see a sports section that impressive ever again.
Opening Things Up
In the end, all of this prompted John T. Brush to open up his books and show the paper that he was actually losing money:
These figures are quite remarkable, and represent the only officially released club income and expense reports I’m aware of. They were also reprinted in Sporting Life later that week:
We can try to dig into this a little bit, though I defer to the editors of Sporting Life on the specifics.
Brush claims to have received $71,075 in gate receipts for home games in 1899. Now, remember that this was the year of the Cleveland Spiders fiasco, which meant that the Reds wound up with 86 home games in the planned 154 game schedule (14 games each against 11 opponents).
The Reds made a little over $826 for each home game, which isn’t exactly spectacular. I’d say it’s pretty safe to assume that most, if not all, tickets cost about $0.25 each, which means they had an average attendance of a little over 3300. I tried to verify the ticket prices, but there were none on the 1899 baseball advertisements I could find:
The $668 for exhibition games seems just about right. Remember that the National League in those days had schedules that started in early April and stretched into mid-October, mostly to allow the big clubs to make a few bucks here and there by playing against local amature sides. That continued until the American and National Leagues came to an agreement in 1903.
Now, you’ll notice that the Reds had to give up just under 50% of the gate receipts to visiting clubs: just over 45%, in fact. They wound up getting a better share of the bargain in the end, though, since their share of the away receipts exceeded the amount they paid out.
I’m not really in any position to judge whether Cincinnati’s traveling expenses were actually $10,000, or if they were closer to $7,000 or whatever. I’d have to imagine that it was probably a little bit more expensive to move a whole team around the country on rail in 1899 than we’d guess: remember that equipment has to go with the players, as well as club staff.
You could say a similar thing about salaries in general. It’s not completely out of the question to expect Brush himself to take a good chunk of change home for his own salary, and a ballclub consisted of a little bit more than just an owner and 17 players back in 1900.
Anyway, whether the numbers are fully believable or not (and I do believe them), they remind us that the game was a lot different back in those days. Notice that there was no revenue from licensing club logos and insignia, for example, nor was there any revenue from radio, television, internet streaming, or anything like that. Heck, the Reds were paying the newspapers for advertising space, not the other way around!
That’s something to keep in mind the next time you play a 1900 project with OOTP!