Baseball and the Bottom Line in World War II: Gunning for Profits on the Home Front by Jeff Obermeyer (review)

Reviewed by: Baseball and the Bottom Line in World War II: Gunning for Profits on the Home Front by Jeff Obermeyer Roberta J. Newman Jeff Obermeyer. Baseball and the Bottom Line in World War II: Gunning for Profits on the Home Front. Jefferson nc: McFarland, 2013. 240 pp. Paper, $39.95. As has been well documented, shortly after the United States entered World War II, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis penned a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking whether professional baseball should halt operations while the nation was at war. Roosevelt’s response, the famous “green light letter,” stated that the spectator sport would provide much needed respite to those laboring in war industries and should carry on. Nevertheless, professional baseball’s entrepreneurs necessarily needed to make adjustments to their business model in response to new economic shortages, not least of which were wartime labor shortages, material shortages, and the necessity of doing everything possible to appear to be throwing their full-fledged support to the war effort, above all else. In the introduction to Baseball and the Bottom Line in World War II: Gunning for Profits on the Home Front, Jeff Obermeyer questions whether Major League Baseball’s owners were truly interested in participating in the war effort or whether they were attempting to protect the professional game’s public reputation while trying to keep their enterprises financially solvent. As both its title and introduction suggest, Baseball and the Bottom Line purports to focus on the economics of the sport from 1941 to 1945. But in reality, it attempts to do a great deal more. Rather than solely dealing with wartime initiatives and finances, Baseball and the Bottom Line is more of an overview of the sport’s history during this period, paying considerable attention to events and issues only tangentially important to its stated purpose. Baseball and the Bottom Line is most successful when it deals directly with the economy of the sport. Writing of Major League Baseball’s initiatives to aid in the war effort, for example, the book examines the War Bond League, [End Page 136] initially suggested by a Treasury Department administrator, William Callen. Obermeyer writes, “What Callen and the New York clubs created was essentially the first fantasy baseball league, with local business owners bidding for the rights to specific players to represent them in the league.” Indeed, according to Obermeyer, the player auction was responsible for felling $123,850,000 in war bonds. This and other initiatives like “a ‘Kitchen Fat Day’ hosted by the Dodgers in July 1943 to collect used grease to make glycerin for artillery shells,” did a great deal to burnish Major League Baseball’s image and, hence, its coffers (65). Also extremely interesting is a discussion of the importance of concession stands in generating profit during wartime. In 1943, notes Obermeyer, a bill came before Congress aimed at banning the sale of food at locations other than restaurants. He writes, “With most teams working on thin margins during the war years, the loss of food sales would have proved disastrous as an estimated seven percent of team revenues came from concessions.” He continues, “Without advising Landis, an unnamed ‘club official’ went to Washington to fight the bill, and it eventually died in Congress. … While not specifically a manpower issue, it is evidence that some in the ownership ranks were willing to oppose Landis by going directly to the government to seek support for their businesses” (75). In fact, this is just one occasion detailed in Baseball and the Bottom Line on which the owners and the commissioner were at odds regarding the economics of their enterprise. Baseball and the Bottom Line includes a number of tables detailing attendance and revenue for major-league clubs as well as for several minor leagues, in the body of the text, rather than as end matter. These tables are extremely useful, as they provide illustration for the narrative. They are, however, not always fully explained. One table detailing Class aa attendance from 1940–1945 shows a remarkable increase in attendance for the Pacific Coast League in 1944 and ’45. The author attempts to justify the jump—from 1,117,209 in 1943...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.