They were up to $15 per game by 1984. The comment that really threw me is one of the Pirettes commented on this and said at that rate they made more than the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. A snarky columnist did the math and guesstimated that giving away foul balls caught by the ball girls cost between $8,000 and $16,000 a year. Apparently the players were also told during spring training to stop throwing caught balls away.
Then again, the team also reportedly lost $6 million that season (finishing last) and prompting the longtime owners to sell, so it was clearly a search-under-the-cushions mentality in that moment.
I was thinking the same thing, Jeff! And all of the misogyny that they put up with, I don’t think anyone gave that much thought in the early eighties. Sure there was the ERA movement but that didn’t seem to affect professional baseball back then. That was a brilliant catch by the one Pirette in the YouTube video! Always interesting, Paul!
Living in Pittsburgh, but not attending a Pirates game in several years, I don’t know what the fielding crew situation there is these days. Also, thanks for the shoutout to my current employer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
They and the Pittsburgh Press had most of the coverage I used in the piece. And the North Hills News Record, since a good number of Pirettes ended up hailing from that area. I think the 1970s might have been the apex of print journalism, where you had just an enormous number of publications and nearly all of them were laid out for readability / not jammed full of tiny type.
Today’s games all you gotta do practically look at a ball & it’s tossed it seems. I never counted but I’m guessing they go through close to 100 per game.
A whopping $10/game! How did the Pirates manage to squeeze that from their profits?
They were up to $15 per game by 1984. The comment that really threw me is one of the Pirettes commented on this and said at that rate they made more than the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. A snarky columnist did the math and guesstimated that giving away foul balls caught by the ball girls cost between $8,000 and $16,000 a year. Apparently the players were also told during spring training to stop throwing caught balls away.
Then again, the team also reportedly lost $6 million that season (finishing last) and prompting the longtime owners to sell, so it was clearly a search-under-the-cushions mentality in that moment.
I was thinking the same thing, Jeff! And all of the misogyny that they put up with, I don’t think anyone gave that much thought in the early eighties. Sure there was the ERA movement but that didn’t seem to affect professional baseball back then. That was a brilliant catch by the one Pirette in the YouTube video! Always interesting, Paul!
Living in Pittsburgh, but not attending a Pirates game in several years, I don’t know what the fielding crew situation there is these days. Also, thanks for the shoutout to my current employer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
They and the Pittsburgh Press had most of the coverage I used in the piece. And the North Hills News Record, since a good number of Pirettes ended up hailing from that area. I think the 1970s might have been the apex of print journalism, where you had just an enormous number of publications and nearly all of them were laid out for readability / not jammed full of tiny type.
Today’s games all you gotta do practically look at a ball & it’s tossed it seems. I never counted but I’m guessing they go through close to 100 per game.