A photograph of the sold-out crowd at Yankee Stadium’s first opening day. The park’s three tiers can be seen in the top left corner of the image. Courtesy Library of Congress.
This piece is a response to our call for submissions, Histories of Sport. For our submission guidelines, click here.
In June, I attended Major League Baseball’s (MLB) London Series—one of MLB’s many attempts to expand its fanbase. Baseball (or at least its modern, American version) has never been particularly popular in the United Kingdom, despite numerous efforts by American businesspeople over the last nearly 150 years to make it so.[1] Given that, I expected a foreign feeling at London Stadium for the games. Constructed for the 2012 Olympics and now the home of West Ham United Football Club, the stadium was clearly not designed for baseball, and hearing “God Save the King” sung before a baseball game was jarring. However, arriving at the venue was an oddly familiar experience.
An American firm responsible designing for many MLB ballparks, Populous, jointly designed the facility with an English firm. The 20-minute walk from the nearest tube stop to London Stadium took me through high-rise condo buildings with modern bars, restaurants, and high-end shopping at street level, not dissimilar from the areas surrounding major-league ballparks in Washington, D.C., Chicago, suburban Atlanta, and St. Louis. In retrospect, I should not have been surprised by this familiarity. Aside from the push for Sunday baseball between the 1910s and the early 1930s and the institution of night games in the 1930s and 1940s, every major attempt to bring more fans to MLB ballparks has been primarily geared at attracting more middle- and upper-class people.
MLB’s focus on wealthier fans stands in stark contrast to rhetoric about the ballpark that had long called it a site of egalitarian intermixing. In 1912, for example, a writer for Baseball Magazine argued that the fan “is the representative American institution. His ranks are filled from every class of society, by every one of the many nationalities which combine to make the American nation.”[2] That same year, journalist Hugh Fullerton wrote that “in stand and bleachers all are equal during a hard game.”[3] Similarly, in 1935 Meyer Berger claimed in the New York Times that “at the height of his frenzy, the rooter knows no class distinction.”[4] In 1988, author Peter Golenbock argued, “black, white, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Moslem, gay or straight, pro-abortion, pro-life, the disparate interest groups agree on little except for their love of the National Pastime. Go to a ball game. In Fenway Park Harvard Professors sit and talk the same language with the fans with blue collars.”[5]
While the focus of this piece is access to MLB games across socioeconomic class, it is vital to note that race and, in particular, whiteness, has long been a central organizing element of baseball in the United States.[6] Some of my other scholarship focuses on racial segregation in the stands at MLB ballparks, the manner in which MLB parks were designed to respond to white Americans’ emotions about urban space, and the many ways that Black Americans were marginalized at MLB ballparks.[7]
At the beginning of the twentieth century, St. Louis was the southern- and westernmost city with an MLB team and all MLB games were played during the day. Although most midwestern cities permitted MLB teams to play games on Sundays, at half of MLB facilities, Sunday games were illegal.[8] In an era when most working-class jobs were six-days-a-week commitments, many of those workers were unable to attend games regularly. Between the 1910s and the 1930s, team owners and baseball fans successfully pushed legislators to legalize Sunday baseball, resulting in increased attendance, particularly among working-class fans.[9]
A photograph of the exterior of the original Yankee Stadium, c. 1925. Courtesy Library of Congress.
Increased attendance, however, made it more likely that middle- and upper-class fans, whose comparably flexible work schedule allowed them to attend more regularly, might well encounter working-class fans. Team owners worried such encounters would push wealthier fans away. Yankee Stadium, which opened in 1923, partially rectified the issue with its then-unique three-tiered structure.[10] The physical tiers of the stadium came with differently priced tickets, meaning that wealthy Yankees fans could pay more if they wanted to watch Babe Ruth without sitting next to working-class fans. Many of Yankee Stadium’s innovations would come to be incorporated in later parks.
Across MLB, all games were played in daylight until 1935, when Cincinnati Reds president Larry MacPhail convinced the other National League owners to allow his team to host the first seven night games in MLB history. The Reds were, at the time, one of MLB’s worst teams and they were in one of its smallest cities—in other words, they had fewer potential fans to begin with and those fans had little reason to watch them. Night games, played exclusively on weekdays, allowed many more fans to attend.[11] In 1935, the Reds drew approximately as many fans from their seven night games as they drew from all other weekday games that season combined—about a third of their total attendance that season.[12] Although World War II restrictions hindered the spread of night baseball, by 1948 fifteen of sixteen MLB teams were playing night games in their home ballparks, allowing fans who worked during the day to attend regularly.
As night games increased, some MLB teams—notably the Philadelphia A’s and the New York Yankees—created private clubs for their season and box-seat ticket holders, who, given the cost of those tickets, were the fans most likely to be wealthy. One journalist described the Stadium Club at Yankee Stadium, which opened in 1946, as “two swank taverns under the stands where thirsty holders of season tickets [could]quaff a stray beaker safe from the vulgar gaze of the hoi-polloi” and another said it was where “the elite meet to eat.”[13] Because night games meant more people could attend, team owners provided their wealthiest fans with new spaces further removed from the masses. As the success of the Stadium Club rapidly became evident, other MLB teams opened their own versions.
Of course, exclusive spaces for the wealthiest fans had no impact on postwar suburbanization. As more middle- and upper-class fans left urban areas for the suburbs and the sunbelt south, MLB made sure to cater to them by relocating franchises to the suburbs or the sunbelt south and adding expansion franchises in new parts of the country. The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s saw MLB increase from sixteen teams to twenty-six and featured a wave of new, car- and suburban-accessible stadiums with even more exclusive spaces than their predecessors. Most of those facilities were constructed with municipal funding—a rarity before 1950 but essentially the rule for every stadium built since then—and their cost was often disproportionately borne by poorer, urban residents, while the stadiums were designed with suburbanites in mind.
Perhaps the most innovative of the new stadiums was the Harris County Domed Stadium, better known as the Astrodome after its primary tenant, the Houston Astros. The Astrodome opened in 1965 and was paid for by municipal bonds that cost far, far more than the county received in rent on the facility. Where Yankee Stadium’s three tiers had once been novel, the Astrodome had seven. It was functionally inaccessible via mass transportation, largely reachable only by private automobile and therefore perfectly suited for metropolitan Houston’s growing middle- and upper-class suburban population. Aside from the absolute cheapest seats in the ballpark, every one had cushioned backs and bottoms (the “cheap” seats only had cushioned bottoms) and were intended to rival “the world’s finest theatres.”[14] In describing the benefits of a climate controlled indoor baseball stadium, one Astros executive said that “women will take a different view of sports events…. They can have their hair done, wear a new dress, and come to a ball game as easy and as comfortable as going to the opera.”[15] One commentator noted that “the Astrodome brought opera to sports, the kinds of crowds you saw there, the dress, the fashion, the taste, the style.”[16]
The Astrodome in the foreground, showing its surrounding parking lots and automobile accessibility. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Courtesy Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Via Library of Congress.
The clearest signs that the ballpark was aiming to attract an elite audience, however, were its pioneering skyboxes located at the top of the dome. The fifty-three skyboxes had a capacity of either twenty-four, thirty, or fifty-four fans and could only be reached by private elevators.[17] All were leased on five-year terms at a cost of between $15,000 and $34,000 annually.[18] Skybox amenities included a stock ticker, ice maker, gold telephone, silver coffee urn, and private bathroom.[19] As a Sports Illustrated reporter noted, each box was “decorated in a riot of astounding styles from western to Oriental to heaven-knows-what” and named after its design theme.[20] Some of those names included Imperial Orient, Pagoda Den, Panjim Emerald, Egyptian Autumn, Old South, Southern Plantation, Old Mexico, The Aztec, Hispania, Spanish Lady, Laverne Aloha, and Tahitian Holiday.[21] Designed to most appeal to the wealthiest fans, the Astrodome was the newest and fanciest stadium, the one other MLB owners soon copied and the inspiration for the proliferation of luxury suites across professional sports.
By the 1980s, the Astrodome’s modernist style and suburban location fell out of favor with baseball fans, team owners, and architects; the next wave of ballpark design was postmodern and, in the words of several observers, “urbanoid.”[22] One of the earliest and most influential of these ballparks was Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards, designed by the firm that would later be known as Populous, which opened in 1992. It was funded by a series of specially created state lottery games that, as one elected official noted “[prey] upon the poorest members of society.”[23] In other words, the bulk of the construction costs were borne by lower-income Marylanders. Similar funding schemes became common across MLB.
A photograph of Camden Yards showing downtown Baltimore and Inner Harbor—the location of Harborplace—in the distance. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Courtesy Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Via Library of Congress.
Moreover, Camden Yards was not far from Harborplace, the city’s renovated harbor area that, in the 1980s, had been transformed with shops and museums catering to a primarily middle- and upper-class, suburban audience. Like its neighbor, despite being in the city, Camden Yards was designed to appeal to wealthy suburbanites more than to working-class urbanites. In the words of geographer Darrel Crilley, spaces like Harborplace and Camden Yards were “programmed to filter the social heterogeneity of the urban crowd, substituting in its place a flawless fabric of white middle class work, play and consumption.”[24] Not only did poor Marylanders contribute most of the construction costs, but the facility was designed to marginalize them. In the decades since Camden Yards opened, all but a handful of MLB teams have moved into new parks that, like Camden Yards, are designed to extract as much money as possible from the wealthiest of fans rather than to grow interest in baseball among poorer Americans.
Given the trajectory of MLB stadium design, the London Series fits squarely in MLB’s pattern of trying to increase its fanbase among the middle- and upper-classes, pricing working-class fans out of ballparks. Additionally, London Stadium and its environs mirror the structure of many American venues, with surrounding residences and businesses that cater to middle- and upper-class fans. As capitalists, MLB and baseball franchise owners are first and foremost interested in increasing revenue, and they see extracting more money from their wealthiest fans as the best way to do that, rather than expanding their fanbase as wide as they can.
Seth S. Tannenbaum is an assistant professor of sport studies at Manhattanville University. He earned a Ph.D. in American History at Temple University and a B.A. in History at Vassar College. His teaching and research focus on using sport to unpack and understand the world around us. His manuscript, “More than a Ballpark: The Baseball Fan Experience as a Window into American Society,” examines Americans’ changing understandings of urban areas, inclusion, and the body politic. It analyzes how, amid significant changes in cities and in leisure consumption patterns, team owners shaped and reshaped the fan experience to reinforce the social hierarchies that existed outside the ballpark. His scholarship has been published in The Journal of Sport History, The Journal of African American History, and Nine: A Journal of Baseball History & Culture, among a number of other venues. Along with his Manhattanville Sport Studies colleagues, Dr. Tannenbaum is a co–project director for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant examining the intersection of Latinx studies and sport studies.
[1] Thomas W. Zeiler, Ambassadors in Pinstripes: The Spalding World Baseball Tour and the Birth of the American Empire (2006).
[2] William A. Phelon, “The Great American Fan: A National Institution,” Baseball Magazine, June 1912, p. 1.
[3] Hugh S. Fullerton, “Fans: Motto: May the Best Team Win; But Ours Is the Best,” American Magazine, 74 (Aug. 1912), 465–66.
[4] Meyer Berger, “In the Ball Park Every Man’s a King,” New York Times, April 14, 1935.
[5] Peter Golenbock, “Preface,” in The Best of Spitball, ed. Mike Shannon (1988), 5–6.
[6] Ryan A. Swanson, When Baseball Went White: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Dreams of a National Pastime (2014).
[7] Seth S. Tannenbaum, “The Desegregation of Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis: Black Baseball Fans’ Use of the National Pastime to Fight White Supremacy,” Journal of African American History, 106 (Spring 2021), 220–48; Seth S. Tannenbaum, “How Major League Baseball Parks Reveal the White Middle-Class’s Views on Cities,” Journal of Sport History, 50 (Spring 2023), 32–47; “Seth Tannenbaum on the Historical Marginalization of Black Fans at Major League Baseball Games,” June 11, 2024 in BSSH Sport in History Podcast, produced by Geoff Levett, podcast, MP3 audio, https://soundcloud.com/bssh-london/seth-tannenbaum-on-the-historical-marginalization-of-black-fans-at-major-league-baseball-games.
[8] Steven A. Riess, Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era (1999), 134–55.
[9] Ibid., 52.
[10] Roi L. Morin, “Stadia—Part II: The Yankee Stadium, New York Osborn Engineering Co., Architects and Engineers,” American Architect and the Architectural Review, Nov. 7, 1923, pp. 412–16.
[11] Larry MacPhail, “The Triumph of the Arc Lights,” Baseball Magazine, Sept. 1936, p. 445.
[12] “Big League Baseball,” Fortune, Aug. 1937, p. 116.
[13] Arthur Daley, “More Stars, More Fans, More Everything: Superlatives Mark the Post-War Baseball Season Which Opens on Tuesday with Tumult and Shouting,” New York Times, April 14, 1946; Gay Talese, “There Are Fans—And Yankee Fans,” New York Times, June 19, 1958.
[14] The Houston Sports Association, Inc., Inside the Astrodome: The Eighth Wonder of the World! (1965), 41.
[15] Dave Bruce, “Rain or Shine Stadium,” Texas Parade, n.d., folder 18: Stadiums—Astrodome, box 46, series III: Subject Files, 1876–1998, American League Papers (A. Barlett Giamatti Research Center, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.).
[16] Geoff Winningham, dir., The Pleasures of This Stately Dome: A Celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the Astrodome, prod. Geoff Winningham (1976).
[17] Astrodome tri-fold pamphlet, folder 18: Stadiums—Astrodome, box 46, series III: Subject Files, 1876–1998, American League Papers.
[18] “In Texas, Where Everything Is Big, Houston Stadium Is the Greatest,” New York Times, Dec. 6, 1964.
[19] “The Business of Baseball,” Newsweek, April 26, 1965, p. 66.
[20] Liz Smith, “Giltfinger’s Golden Dome,” Sports Illustrated, April 12, 1965, p. 56.
[21] Houston Sports Association, Inside the Astrodome, 34.
[22] John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (1998), 6.
[23] Roz Hamlett, “Will Stadium Be Built on the Backs of the Poor?” Baltimore Afro-American, March 14, 1987.
[24] Darrell Crilley, “Megastructures and Urban Change: Aesthetics, Ideology and Design,” in The Restless Urban Landscape, ed. Paul L. Knox (1993), 154.
