Reeling from scandals in the 1870s, baseball’s owners consciously sought to make the sport respectable by broadening its upper- and middle-class fan-base. The stadiums they built in the 1880s and beyond would separate fans based by class and race, inviting “bourgeois white men and women to the center of spectatorship” as historian PJ Carlino puts it, while marginalizing non-white, working class, and immigrant fans to the bleachers.
Baseball spectatorship was relatively egalitarian initially: fans stood or sat on the ground around the field. Class stratification became marked by elevation: standing on a carriage. Then came the first enclosed baseball stadium in the US, Brooklyn’s Union Grounds (1862), which was also the first ballpark to charge an entrance fee and the first to use fencing to block the view from outside. Women were welcomed with seating and facilities. “Profit underlay the rhetoric of female accommodation and civility” writes Carlino, because a respectable woman in public was supposed to have a male escort, thus doubling the box-office take. As in waiting rooms and on trains and ships, “ladies” accommodations at the stadium were restricted to white women.
The presence of ladies was supposed to make men gentlemen. Theaters taught baseball that seating played a big role in this; supposedly, a sitting crowd was a more genteel crowd, especially in numbered and reserved seats that acted as barriers to neighboring seats. Baseball stadiums started using opera chairs in the grandstands in the 1880s, as “[m]iddle class spectators associated the [opera chair] design with entertainment free from corruption, vulgar behavior, and unclean bodies.”
Buffalo’s National League stadium charged seventy-five cents for a male escort seat in the ladies stand in 1883. Ladies paid thirty cents; the surcharge was supposed to convince women that their male neighbors were of the best class. In that same year, a Cincinnati stadium “charged sixty cents for reserved and numbered grandstand chairs, fifty cents for a section of unreserved covered benches, and twenty-five cents for seats on massive tiers of uncovered benches.” Unstated was the color line: regardless of what they could afford, Black spectators could not buy into the good seats—although exceptions were sometimes made in northern stadiums during games between all-white and all-Black teams.