Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on August 23, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2008 9(4):816-840; doi:10.1093/es/khn081
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The New York Yankees Cope with the Great Depression
DAVID G. SURDAM is an economics professor at the University of Northern Iowa. His book The Postwar Yankees: Baseball's Golden Age Revisited is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press.
Contact information: Economics Department, University of Northern Iowa, 204 Curris Business Building, Cedar Falls, Iowa 50613, USA. E-mail: david.surdam{at}uni.edu.
The New York Yankees donated their financial records to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. These records provide a rare glimpse into the business of professional team sports. I use these records to examine how the Yankees’ management reacted to the Great Depression. Since the team possessed both price-setting power over ticket prices and monopsony power over player salaries, how did the team adjust ticket prices and salaries in response to the falling incomes of its customers and general deflation of the early 1930s? How did the team's response differ from other teams in Major League Baseball?
The author thanks Claudette Burke, reference librarian at the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum, for introducing him to the New York Yankees’ financial records, and her colleague, Mary Bellew, Assistant Registrar, for providing photos of ticket stubs from the museum's collection. George Rugg, curator of the Joyce Sports Collection, Notre Dame University provided sports periodicals from the era. Louis Cain, John R. Hanson III, and participants at the Social Science History Association session on sports economics and the University of Northern Iowa College of Business Administration workshop provided useful comments. Several anonymous referees also provided valuable insights. The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business provided travel funding for the early stages of the author's research, and the College of Business Administration at the University of Northern Iowa provided funding for participation at the Social Science History Association annual meetings.