Читать книгу No Money, No Beer, No Pennants. The Cleveland Indians and Baseball in the Great Depression онлайн

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Spring training eventually turned into Opening Day, much to the delight of the eager Cleveland fans. League Park was again completely sold out. The oddsmakers in New York had the Indians listed as a 50-to-1 shot at the pennant, with 10-to-1 odds to finish in third place. As expected, the Yankees and Athletics were the favorites to claim the top spots. If you were an audacious gambler you might put money down on the Boston Red Sox, who came in at 1,000-to-1 odds to end up on top. Damon Runyon, in his syndicated column, offended the Cleveland fans by picking the Indians to finish seventh. Runyon was clearly not a first-class handicapper. He had the Philadelphia Athletics in fourth place while most writers had them fighting for the pennant. Stuart Bell of the Cleveland Press believed the locals would win eighty games. He based that on the new pitchers, who he figured on bringing another fifteen to twenty wins to the table.

Billy Evans sat in his upstairs office, dreaming of the new stadium and the prospect of filling double or triple the number of the twenty-five thousand seats available at the current home grounds. A full house at League Park would net the club roughly $20,000, but a crowd of just forty to fifty thousand at the new site would bring the team $35,000 to $40,000. No wonder Evans had dollar signs floating around his brain.