Ballplayers and Real Estate

Baseball players Ty Cobb and Joe Jackson. Image credits: Etsy

Once upon a time, way back in time, when most major league ballplayers’ salaries were in the low four-figures, investing their excess income was not a problem: There was none.

Many players were farmers. If they were lucky enough to get a World Series share, it often went into adding more farmland or building a house. 

Gradually, as salaries rose a little and, for the stars, a lot, real estate salesmen and promoters figured that ballplayers on successful teams would be good prospects.

Sometime around 1910 a promoter visited the White Sox clubhouse pitching land in Oregon. Chicago catcher-manager Billy Sullivan bought a 20-acre apple and walnut orchard about 25 miles from Portland, called it the Home Plate Orchard, and moved his family there.

Another player bought an adjoining 98 acres and called it the White Sox Orchard.

Ty Cobb

Only a few players, like Ty Cobb, were attuned to the business world. While other players hung around poolrooms or hotel lobbies, Cobb sought out the company of businessmen and financiers, where he heard talk about new companies like General Motors and Coca-Cola. That’s where his money went.

John McGraw

John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson of the nineteenth-century Baltimore Orioles were entrepreneurs, building a successful combination bar and grill-bowling alley-pool room-social club in Baltimore before moving on to the New York Giants.

Baltimore legend John McGraw was involved in a few business and real estate opportunities during his time as a player and manager. Image credits: 3 BP Blogspot

McGraw was later involved in a disastrous land development project that cost him and some of his players a lot of money. It happened during the Florida boom and bust that began in 1924.

By 1925 it seemed like every other resident of the state had become a real estate agent and none of the buyers ever saw the lots they were buying – and selling as prices doubled and doubled again in weeks, sometimes days. 

Pennant Park

The Giants’ spring training camp was in Sarasota on the west coast of Florida when the boom began. John McGraw had bought a home there and lent his name and reputation to a development called Pennant Park.

The streets were named for favorite Giants players: Mathewson Park, Bresnahan Boulevard, etc. Full-page ads in New York papers featured McGraw pitching lots priced between $2,500 and $5,000. The money poured into the Giants’ offices in New York.

Ft. Myers

In 1925 the Philadelphia Athletics moved their spring training camp from Montgomery, Alabama, down the west coast of Florida to Ft. Myers. A sleepy, isolated town before the land boom engulfed the entire state, its Main Street was now clogged with real estate salesmen hawking acreage that had already risen 50 to 100 times in price – not 100 percent but 100 times in the past few years.

Some of the acreage, bought by people who never saw it, was in fact under water. A standard vaudeville joke was: “Congratulations. They found land on your land in Florida.”

The A’s were a young team. Kids like Foxx and Cochrane and Grove and Hauser didn’t even have enough money to buy an ice cream soda. When they rode up to Sarasota to play the Giants, all the talk among the Giants’ players, who had earned World Series shares for the past four years, was about buying and selling land and McGraw’s Pennant Park and the grand yacht club it was going to have.

Some players and coaches had joined the thousands of locals who had taken out real esate licenses. Catcher Grover Hartley claimed he had made more money in real estate that winter than he had playing ball for the past four years.

The End

And then it all blew away with a hurricane that devastated Miami in September 1926. Suddenly everybody wanted to sell, but nobody wanted to buy. It turned out that some investors had no land to sell; realtors had sold more plots than actually existed in Pennant Park.

Pennant Park investors besieged the Giants offices and John McGraw for refunds. They threatened to go to court. McGraw lost his Sarasota home, but other than that there are no records of just how much the whole fiasco cost him or to what extent he or the Giants tried to repair the damage. McGraw’s health was already declining. He would win no more pennants before resigning in 1932, and died two years later at the age of 60.

The whole experience was but a prelude to the bursting of all the country’s bubbles three years later, ushering in the Great Depression. By then farm mortgages were being foreclosed, and not even money in the bank was safe; thrifty ballplayers along with millions of fans lost their savings when banks closed.