Age of Ruth and Landis

David George Surdam is a professor of economics and the David W. Wilson Business Ethics Fellow at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author of several books, including Run to Glory and Profits: The Economic Rise of the NFL during the 1950s (Nebraska, 2013) and Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression (Nebraska, 2011). Michael J. Haupert is a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse.

• List of TablesAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Baseball’s Interminable Wars2. The Rise of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis3. Baseball’s Longstanding Gambling Problem4. The Financial Side of the Game5. Getting Fans to the Ballpark6. Trying to Make the Game More Popular7. Not a Perfect Game8. The Stars Are Realigned9. Competitive Balance and Its Discontents10. Owners versus Players11. Highly Paid but Exploited Players12. Hang On, the Minor Leagues’ Bumpy Ride13. Baseball and Ethnic Diversity14. Hilldale and the Negro Leagues in the 1920sEpilogue: The Roaring Twenties and Major League BaseballAppendix 1: New York Yankees Financial RecordsAppendix 2: Salary Data SourcesNotesBibliographyIndex

“Two of the sport’s leading economic historians provide a perceptive, multifaceted exploration of baseball’s economics and governance in the decade after the National Commission’s collapse. And, like the Sultan of Swat, Surdam and Haupert touch all the bases.”—Trey Strecker, editor of NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture“The financial information on a Negro League team offers important new insights into the game’s economics outside Major League Baseball. An added bonus [is] the great wealth of informative, valuable tables. . . . This book [is] essential for anyone researching baseball in the 1920s. It should also appeal to the larger group of scholars and readers interested in the history of the business of baseball.”—Daniel Levitt, coauthor of In Pursuit of Pennants: Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball