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Originally Posted by thehef
Yep, I'm working on the 1931 PCL schedule. In looking at your info for the 1930 schedule, specifically the start times of games...
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Fantastic! Make sure you post your schedule here when you're finished.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thehef
... I'm assuming those start times are not historical per se, but are based upon what you settled upon as expressed in this thread's initial post.
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Yeah. 3:00 was a pretty common start time for baseball games, especially at the major-league level and especially in the era before night baseball. As more and more teams installed lights, however, the start times for day games actually moved up, so that teams that might have started at 3:00 in the 1920s were starting at 2:00 or even earlier by the 1950s. When I was a kid, for instance, everyone knew that Cubs games started at 1:20.
I'm not sure why that happened. The 3:00 start time was to accommodate white-collar workers, whose workdays often ended at 3:00 during the summer. During the McGraw era, NY Giants used to start their games at 4:00 - the rationale being that workers in the financial district who got out of work at 3:00 would have to take the subway to the Polo Grounds, which was at the northern end of Manhattan (you can take a look at
this thread for more information on that). I can only guess that ballclubs stopped trying to grab the after-work crowd and started looking at the after-school crowd as a way to boost attendance. Of course, as Lee Elia pointed out, the only adults who could regularly attend Cubs day games were the chronically unemployed (although he put it in a
much more colorful way).
Quote:
Originally Posted by thehef
LGO's 1931 PCL schedule (the data is not in OOTP schedule format) indicates that all games were played during the day (except for a some - the Sacramento team's games played at Stockton - that were indicated as morning games; he has no night games indicated. My hunch is that his source indicated all games as being day games because at the time of publishing the schedule, it was not known when each team would begin hosting night games, that it would be determined by each team at a later day, and likely influenced by weather.
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I think that's correct. 1930/1931 represents the break between all day games and the introduction of lights in minor-league baseball, and that transition happened
fast. It's like there were maybe a few clubs that had lights mounted on trucks in 1930 and then in 1931 practically
everyone had permanent lights installed. And since it was largely up to each individual club to decide when they'd have night games, that information wasn't always included in the schedules printed in the pre-season.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thehef
If you have any suggestions, etc., before I finalize the file, please let me know  |
Sounds great! I look forward to the finished product.