Across MLB, all games were played in daylight until 1935, when Cincinnati Reds president Larry MacPhail convinced the other National League owners to allow his team to host the first seven night games in MLB history. The Reds were, at the time, one of MLB’s worst teams and they were in one of its smallest cities—in other words, they had fewer potential fans to begin with and those fans had little reason to watch them. Night games, played exclusively on weekdays, allowed many more fans to attend. In 1935, the Reds drew approximately as many fans from their seven night games as they drew from all other weekday games that season combined—about a third of their total attendance that season. Although World War II restrictions hindered the spread of night baseball, by 1948 fifteen of sixteen MLB teams were playing night games in their home ballparks, allowing fans who worked during the day to attend regularly.
As night games increased, some MLB teams—notably the Philadelphia A’s and the New York Yankees—created private clubs for their season and box-seat ticket holders, who, given the cost of those tickets, were the fans most likely to be wealthy. One journalist described the Stadium Club at Yankee Stadium, which opened in 1946, as “two swank taverns under the stands where thirsty holders of season tickets [could]quaff a stray beaker safe from the vulgar gaze of the hoi-polloi” and another said it was where “the elite meet to eat.” Because night games meant more people could attend, team owners provided their wealthiest fans with new spaces further removed from the masses. As the success of the Stadium Club rapidly became evident, other MLB teams opened their own versions.
Of course, exclusive spaces for the wealthiest fans had no impact on postwar suburbanization. As more middle- and upper-class fans left urban areas for the suburbs and the sunbelt south, MLB made sure to cater to them by relocating franchises to the suburbs or the sunbelt south and adding expansion franchises in new parts of the country. The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s saw MLB increase from sixteen teams to twenty-six and featured a wave of new, car- and suburban-accessible stadiums with even more exclusive spaces than their predecessors. Most of those facilities were constructed with municipal funding—a rarity before 1950 but essentially the rule for every stadium built since then—and their cost was often disproportionately borne by poorer, urban residents, while the stadiums were designed with suburbanites in mind.