Baseball fans attend Major League Baseball games for many reasons-to watch their home team in the midst of a winning season; to bask in the afterglow of a recent World Series win; or to see a newly acquired All-Star. But many impersonal factors determine how many people attend a Major League Baseball game, including local unemployment rates, the presence of other professional sporting franchises, or the number of games broadcast on television. What Took Me Out to the Ball Game utilizes a linear regression analysis to examine competitive and team-market factors that permeated Major League Baseball during the 1990s and what impact they had on attendance at games. It examines the significance of twenty market and team-quality factors, in particular the impact of the 1994 labor strike which caused the cancellation of hundreds of games and the World Series in 1994.

Katharine E. Willers is a lifelong baseball fan and economic enthusiast. Resulting from research she did for this book, she spent a summer as a researcher at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, New York.

Ms. Willers graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University with a BA in Economics and earned an MA in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. After initially pursuing a career in business and marketing, she transitioned to a career in policy and international affairs.

Katharine is married and currently resides in the Washington, DC area.