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February 3, 2009

You Could Look It Up

Rumors of Distant Thunder

by Steven Goldman

In the last few weeks we've all heard a great deal about the plethora of free agents still waiting to be signed at this late time of year, and how one could construct the core of a strong team with orphaned ballplayers: Bobby Abreu in right field, Adam Dunn in left, Manny Ramirez as the DH, an all-Orlando double-play combination of Hudson and Cabrera. We've also had the reason for the existence of these orphans explained again and again: the economy is on life support. Teams do not want to be on the hook for eight-figure salaries in these uncertain times, so they're waiting for the free agents to blink and accept seven-figure salaries, contracts with shorter durations, or both. All of the pressure, these reports seem to suggest, is on the players.

And yet, as the clock ticks down to pitchers and catchers, we should see some of that pressure begin to shift to the buyers. As the economy slows and the players remain on the market, the question is: Do their salary demands fall faster than the teams' ability to afford them? In theory, the benefit should be on the teams' side at this stage; while attendance remains the principal driver of revenue for many teams and will likely decline this season, there are other revenue streams, such as media contracts, that are locked in, and thus not subject to the loop-de-loop of our declining fortunes. As such, even teams that normally do not bid on free agents will be forced to answer a difficult question from their fans: "How did you allow a historic, hopefully not-to-be-repeated opportunity to add a top-quality hitter to your roster at a bargain price slip by?"

Ironically, teams that plead poverty and fail to take advantage of this opportunity are more likely to suffer by reinforcing in the public the very reasons for their declining attendance in the first place. In an era in which a family of four is gouged for hundreds of dollars when it attends a ballgame, why should it stretch its declining discretionary dollars to take in a team which promises not to be entertaining?

This lesson is hammered home by a birds'-eye view of attendance figures in the decade before and during the Great Depression:

Team       1921-1930    1931-1940   % Change
Yankees   10,407,836    8,909,698    -14.4%
Browns     3,799,586    1,271,579    -66.5%
Senators   5,102,573    3,907,187    -23.4%
White Sox  5,811,009    4,364,150    -24.9%
Red Sox    3,310,498    5,093,365    +46.2%
Athletics  6,276,235    3,797,557    -39.5%
Tigers     7,748,733    7,803,028    + 1.0%

The only teams to see their fortunes improve at the turnstiles during the Great Depression were the Tigers (to a modest extent) and the Red Sox. The Tigers were enjoying one of the best decades in franchise history, winning three pennants and a championship, and being powered by a gate attraction in annual triple-crown threat Hank Greenberg. The Sox are the best parallel for clubs of today, as beginning in 1932 they completely changed their method of doing business. This change coincided with the purchase of the club by Tom Yawkey from an undercapitalized investment group headed by J.A. Robert Quinn. Yawkey would subsequently hinder the Red Sox in many significant ways over his more than 40 years of ownership, but in the early going he did spend, with the result that the club, while not immediately competitive, did feature entertaining, well-known players such as Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, and, as of 1939, Ted Williams. Conversely, the A's, which were largely divested of stars in response to the economic slowdown, suffered the biggest dip of any team except the Browns. It should also be noted that despite the change in Boston's fortunes, their attendance in the 1931-1940 period was unimpressive by the standards of the previous decade—there is only so much a team can do to drive attendance when the fan-base lacks for basic necessities like actual bread, let alone the dough to spend at the ballpark.