Early 20th Century Ticket Stub Question
 

Regular season (non-WS) tickets were usually printed with just the number of the home game, no date or opponent. As doubleheaders were frequent and not day/night, a ticket to a doubleheader got the bearer admission to both games. So if there were for example 77 home games but 14 of them were contained in doubleheaders, thus rendering the season with only 63 home dates, is it fair to assume that tickets only had the numbers 1-63 printed on them? Which would reflect the 63 home dates which encompassed 77 home games? Or would the tickets be numbered 1-77 and skip the doubleheader game?

For example: game 1 is a single game, home games 2-3 were a doubleheader, home game 4 of the season a single game, home games 5-6 are a doubleheader, home game 7 was a single game. Would the tickets be numbered:

1
2
4
5
7

Or:
1
2
3
4
5

Thanks for any help.

And what about rainouts and makeup games? Surely they woudn't have printed the entire season in advance, so what effect did those have on the numbering? A few years back, I picked up a Washington home ticket originating from a kid's scrapbook wherein he had noted the year for all of his items, and the ticket was in his "1907" section, with a photo of the scrapbook page as proof. It was numbered "44," and I got excited at the idea that this would have put the game in range to have been Walter Johnson's debut in a doubleheader on August 2 that year. But when I tried to pin it down further, I got fouled up by the unknowns regarding the very questions you and I are asking, and nobody seemed to have the answers, so I gave up and sold it for $50. I still wonder about that ticket. Good luck, Jeff.

Why not?

Expense, for one thing. Especially back then, when money was so tight, are you going to print tickets for the entire stadium for every game, then throw away most of them, as attendance was so much smaller then, or are you going to wait until a few days beforehand and try to predict what the demand might be, print those, and have some kind of generic or proof tickets to use for any excess demand that might materialize in the interim? Also, any numbering system would be rendered obsolete by the first rainout. I'm not saying I know how they did do it, but I can't imagine them sucking up the enormous cost of the first scenario when that could be avoided by a more timely system.