Clipping:Newspaper overestimate crowds
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| Date | Sunday, April 8, 1883 |
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| Text | The tendency in newspapers to overestimate base ball attendance is very general. In few cities outside of Cincinnati is any effort made to estimate truly. In Cincinnati the papers are as nearly correct as it is possible to be. All of last season the numbers in attendance on games here as announced in the papers could be depended upon, for it was made from the count of tickets in the boxes. When the papers stated that over twenty-four hundred people had been in attendance at a certain game it could be depended upon as the truth. This year the count will be more accurate, for turnstiles do not lie. All this time we were reading about attendances on games in other cities numbering six, seven and ten thousand, when in reality they were no larger than in Cincinnati. The eight and ten thousand crowds in St. Louis could always be discounted fifty per cent. and then be above the truth. According to receipts there were not quite five thousand four hundred people in the Cincinnati grounds last 4th of July; and everyone remembers what a multitude that made, filling the seats and spreading all over the field. That was an immense crowd. The Athletics took away as their share of the receipts that day $1,632. the Philadelphia papers announced that ten thousand people saw the Cincinnati-Athletic game in Philadelphia on Decoration Day. Yet the Cincinnati Club got for its share the receipts less than $900 from that game, showing that there were not six thousand out. This tendency to overestimate crowds ought to be condemned, and D. L. Reid, who exposed the trick in St. Louis, deserves applause. Very few five-thousand crowds assemble in a year on any base-ball grounds. Club will make friends by furnishing newspapers with actual figures as the Cincinnati Club has been doing, and will continue to do. |
| Source | Cincinnati Commercial Gazette |
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| Submitted by | Richard Hershberger |
| Origin | Initial Hershberger Clippings |
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