Hard to believe, but in the early 1900s there were "Sabbath enactments" in various states which precluded all sorts of activity on Sundays. One that has proved thorny during the 1906 baseball season was the ability to play ball on Sunday.

The July 28, 1906 NYT discusses a test case concerning Sunday Baseball that was to be decided in New York Supreme Court.

To date, there have been at least five different weekends on which Sunday baseball was played and one or more players or managers were arrested for violating the Sabbath enactments. The wording of the laws differed from state to state, but they had in common the ban of "public sport," a term that had a hazy definition.

It seems pretty clear that all involved agreed that charging admission for a baseball game on Sunday would be an example of public sport - and to date that had not been attempted. The alternative, as it has been tried multiple times in 1906, was to have a baseball game in which there was no admission charged but "where the onlookers choose to deposit voluntary contributions in boxes placed in the vicinity of the entrance to the ground."

From the article:

Lawyer Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler, representing the clubs, said the case was brought in order to have a decision from the Supreme Court as to what the Penal Code meant by public sport, which were the words used in the section against Sabbath violation, and maintained that, as the games on the Bronx Oval were not for admission fees, they did not come within the wording of the statute...

Where do the police weigh in?

Deputy Police Commissioner Mathot said a definite ruling was wanted as to what was a violation of the Sabbath and what was not. The police made arrests and the prisoners were almost invariably discharged by the Magistrates the next morning. He explained that failure to interfere on the part of the police led to complaints from religious societies. He conceded that there were no complaints in this particular case and added:

"We are thoroughly indifferent in the matter, but want to get a ruling which will place the police in the position of knowing what action we are to take."

Now, I admit to not being a legal scholar, but it does seem a bit odd that religious societies would want the police to interfere with Sunday baseball. In fact, all such Blue Laws have always interested me. Are they passed to suppress temptation of the flock or the temptation of all? If it is to suppress temptation to the flock, what does this say about the power of the religion/religious leaders to dissuade those from breaking the Sabbath? If it is to reduce temptation to the non-converted, what's up with that? By what right do the religious stop the non-religious from doing what they want?

It is also interesting that the courts are being asked to determine what "breaking the Sabbath" means. Although there are still Blue Laws of various types on the books in different states/cities, it seems that the church-state differences have become less blurred over time. Why should the state determine what can and cannot be done on a Sunday, as a more special day than Tuesday or Thursday?

In the purely economic area, it would be fascinating to obtain revenue figures from these Sunday games. At the time, attendance to a baseball game would range from $0.25 to $0.75, depending on where the seat was located. The free-rider equilibrium would suggest that the donated gate would be less than the required gate, ceteris paribus on the number of people in the stadium. However, if the free gate encouraged more people to show up, the donated gate might actually have been greater than the revenue generated by positive ticket prices.