Ticket collectors, show us your tickets !

[Scott Garner]

Originally Posted by Oldtix

I'm sure one of the trained legal minds on the board will explain it better than I can.

First, we have to suspend disbelief and remember that there was a time in this country when we expected to repay national debt! Imagine that...

The war tax was a tax on all amusements...theatre, sports, etc...to pay off the debts created through sales of Liberty bonds and war stamps related to the costs of waging the First World War. It was applied to baseball against tremendous resistance...principally because it eliminated the long-traditional "two-bit" bleacher seat. The tax added a nickel to the cheapest seats (25 cents) and the lords of baseball proclaimed there would be mass confusion trying to make change for thousands of fans. The more cynical observers predicted that bleacher seats would soon rise to 50 cents.

The words "War Tax" were replaced by "Tax Paid" on later Yankee tickets. I don't know when the official War Tax was ended, but in essence they just changed the addressee on the payments.

Hi Jimmy and Rick.
Interesting topic and I would like to contribute to this topic.
FYI- I have been collecting baseball tickets since 1972. Rick is absolutely correct about why war taxes were added to the admission price of baseball tickets as well as other amusements after WWI. I believe that War taxes were absolutely imposed during the years of 1918 and 1919, and possibly as late as 1920, but I cannot confirm this. Through the years I have seen examples of baseball tickets with actual dates (including year) that showed War taxes issued by the Chicago White Sox, NY Yankees,Cincinnati Reds during the years 1918and 1919. There was a nice article written re: War Taxes on baseball tickets that was in the Sports Collectors Digest within the last 2 years if you would like to dig deeper.

On the topic of double headers:
One thing to keep in mind is that vintage double headers occured for two distinctly different reasons. Sometimes they were scheduled that way at the beginning of the baseball season. But, in addition to this, unscheduled double headers also occured due to weather conditions, etc. Keep in mind that teams during the 1910-1920's traveled to the opposing teams city by train as air travel was obviously not yet available. If a game got rained or snowed out, they would create unscheduled double headers (sometimes even back-to-back double headers) in order to not lose games (and the gate admission $$'s) in the schedule.

My point is, that it is difficult to know how a baseball team's ticket office would handle an "unscheduled double header". Would the team allow the ticket holder, from let's say a rainout in game #26 in the schedule, to use this ticket to gain admission to the unscheduled double header (during, lets say the 27th or 28th game of the schedule), or would they have them trade it in for a ticket to the game where it was being made up? Intuitively, you would expect that a patron would turn in their rain check from game #26 and receive a grandstand or bleacher seat for the makeup game. Occasionally the patron might write some game info on the ticket which can be somewhat helpful. Otherwise it's anybody's guess...

Note: If you are using a resource such as RetroSheet or Baseball Almanac to resolve questions regarding game logs and schedules, it's my opinion that you only have part of the info required when it comes to the double header. The only true way to know if a double header that was played was scheduled or unscheduled would be to look at an original team schedule or use actual vintage newspaper microfilm from the city in which the game(s) was played to give you more detail.

I hope this helps!