Back in the day, before there were any residual incomes from television to drive fan interest in the game, baseball had to rely upon gate income and concession sales to cover the cost of very low player and administrative salaries and minimal maintenance of the club’s equipment, uniform, and venue expenses. It helped if an MLB club owned its own stadium.
1944: Just a Dream. Just a Dream. Just a Dream.
The St. Louis Browns of the American League (1902-1953) did own their own game arena. It was a place known for most of its life as Sportsman’s Park. They also pocketed good side income by serving as landlord to the St. Louis Cardinals of the National League until they sold the place to their highly more successful same-city rivals in 1953, the last year of the Browns’ existence.
It was easy for the Browns to become dependent upon the sale of good ballplayers rather than the attainment of pennants as the unspoken priority plan for economic survival. The club could not draw the fans they needed to pay for a winning team on the field, so, in effect, if not by stated goal, they showcased and sold many of their best talents to wealthy clubs like the Yankees just to pay their bills and stay afloat. As a result, all hope spun as wasted motion in the mud. The St. Louis Browns were going nowhere “up” in the AL standings, except in 1921, when they got there honestly and fell a mere one game short of winning the pennant, and in 1944, when World War II and military draft conspired to leave the Browns with their only pennant winner against inferior competition.
In these 52 annual attendance figures from Baseball Almanac, pay special notice to how bad things got during the Great Depression years. 1935 was their worst year. The Browns drew only 80,922 fans for the season in 1935, To say the least, their per game average of 1,044 fans was both abysmal and unsustainable by today’s financial needs.
It reminds me of pitcher Ned Garver’s favorite line about poor Brownie game attendance during their last generation of air-gasping survival in the years that followed World War II.
“Our fans never booed us,” said Browns pitcher Ned Garver. “They wouldn’t dare. – We outnumbered them.”
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Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 