Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1883 — What We Spend on Base Ball. [ARTICLE]

What We Spend on Base Ball.

A correspondent has made the following rough estimate of the mtpenses attending the eight professional ball clubs'in the country: Salaries of eighty men (average) including substitutes.s9o,ooo Car fare 12,000 Hotel expenses while traveling 12,000 Salary managers 10.000 Salary umpires S,O(X> Traveling expenses of umpire and managers. 3,000 Rental of grounds. QXO Printing 7,000 S.orers’ pay 1,1500 Bat, uniforms, and balls 2,500 Board while clubs are home i>layiug 5,000 'Expense- of ’busses, etc..... .... .... 7«o Incidentals 1,000 T0ta1.'.5155,700 This calculation, which has to do with only one association, or eight clubs (called the Teague,) is evidently too least SIB,OOO in the. first item, for one thing, for salaries. paid to base ball players must average $1,500. One gets $1,500 or $2,000, another $2,500. Some of them get $3,000 a season. Some of the best editorial writers in New 'Sork do not command more. The time has

been when even a higher figure would have expressed that average, but the law of demand and supply appears to be gradually equaTwnguiings, even in base ball. Our correspondent probably underestimates the aggregate expenditure for the League; the truth, likely, would be $200,000 instead of $155,700. But even that $200,000 represents only one association. There are others. In the association of which the Philadelphia Athletic are members, that club is said to have expended—or, which is for our purpose practically the same thing, its backers have expended for it > —the sum of $34,000 this year, and yet it is said the club has cleared a profit of $70,000. This surprising statement becomes possible in the. light of sifch crowds as that famous club has drawq, in its encounters with other noted clubs in some of the cities, 18,000 being in attendance, for example, to see one game at St. Louis, representing $9,000 for that one game, while gatherings of 10,000 have been noted in that and other cities. Probably $250,000 would be an underestimate of the total expenditures by the associations and individuals that back up the various professional nines in the three associations of 1883. But that large expenditure represents only One side of the question, On the other side are the unknown sums that have been paid out by the base-ball loving public for the privilege of witnessing the 370 games. That base ball “pays” financially is indicated by the continuation of the-clubs and the wilespread public interest in the subject. If a quarter of a million has been paid out in keeping up the clubs of 1883, a considerably larger sum has been paid by the spectators of the games. Six hundred thousand dollars would perhaps not be an over-estimate of the total expenditures for base ball this year. Besides the 392 League games, at 50 cents admission, the clubs wind up the season with a series of half-price “exhibition” games. The total expend.tures no doubt exceeds $600,000. —Hartford Times.