The Postwar Yankees

I need to start off by saying that I hate the Yankees. Here in Cleveland, they put stuff in Lake Erie water to make you grow up hating the Yankees, yet I recognize the team’s significance and near-mythic stature in the postwar years, when it seemed that all of baseball gravitated around New York City. In The Postwar Yankees: Baseball’s Golden Age Revisited, David Surdam uses an economist’s lens to deconstruct what is popularly known as baseball’s Golden Age—the postwar years of 1949-1964. While the Yankees piled on pennants and World Series titles, Major League Baseball attendance consistently declined and gate revenue disparity widened throughout the 1950s. Surdam analyzes the roots of this period’s enduring mythology, examines why the Yankees and New York teams were consistently among baseball’s elite, and how economic and social forces set in motion during this time shaped the sport into its modern incarnation. He asks some good questions, such as: Would ballplayers of the time have considered this a “golden” age in which to play? What about fans and teams outside the New York area–was it golden for them? Surdam’s writing is straightford but not boring. If you need to read something by an economist, you could do much worse.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, judge it by baseball’s magic numbers:

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Line   9

First   3 words:

“Major League owners”

The Postwar Yankees: Baseball’s Golden Age Revisited

David G. Surdam

University of Nebraska Press

978-0-8032-1789-8, $45.00, hrdcvr