The Wednesday Day Game

One for the kids?

The Wednesday Day Game

I was surprised to see that the June 29, 1949 game between the Reds and Pirates was a day game. Here’s the advertisement:

From The Pittsburgh Press, June 29, 1949, page 12

It was children’s day — to be followed the next afternoon by ladies’ day. But the interesting thing to me is that the game started so early on a working day.

School was out of session, of course. However, there simply weren’t that many children who could make it all the way out to the ballpark. We know this because there was a significant drop in attendance that day:

Now, the fact that the Pirates were in 7th place probably had something to do with the small crowd. Note, though, that Pittsburgh had no problem drawing almost 35,000 on the Friday night before this game.

My understanding is that night baseball was still treated as an occasional treat instead of the default in 1949. There’s a very good argument to be made that the early afternoon starting time was really detrimental to attendance, however.

What people tend to forget is that starting times were actually a lot later than 1:30 PM during the deadball era. In fact, if you look at June 29, 1909, you’ll see the difference:

From The Pittsburgh Press, June 29, 1909, page 6

This was the last home game the Pirates played before Forbes Field opened on June 30. Note, though, that the Forbes Field opener also started at 3:30 PM.

I strongly suspect that the later starting times during the deadball era had an impact on batting averages due to the shadows. However, I also strongly believe that the teams could only survive financially if they started games when paying customers were off work.