Baseball is, by any measure, more successful right now than it has ever been. Bob DuPuy, the president of Major League Baseball, has asserted that the public spent $6 billion on the sport last year. Next January, it is projected that a Major League Baseball-owned television network will debut in 50 million homes. And a year from now, the Mets and Yankees will open new parks and bring to its apex the era that began 16 years ago with the opening of Baltimore’s Camden Yards.

Obviously, the scandals that have plagued the sport in recent years — from fights among owners over how to split up their money to the congressional investigations into drug use — haven’t much mattered to the public. Last year, total attendance reached 80 million, a preposterous number that represents the sale of one ticket for every 3.76 Americans. People love baseball, and it will take something more than the disgrace of a few famous players to get them to stop spending ever-increasing sums of money on it.

Unfortunately, as anyone who’s read a newspaper lately can attest, that something may be approaching. In the Financial Times earlier this week, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan wrote that the present financial crisis will likely prove “the most wrenching since the end of the second World War.” A former Treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, according to London’s Daily Telegraph, recently described the crisis as “the most serious combination of macro-economic and financial stresses in a generation, and possibly, much longer than that.” And Princeton economist Paul Krugman yesterday wrote in his New York Times blog that we are in effect “suffering from a giant bank run.”

With such sober-minded figures invoking, if only by implication, the rolling crises that began the Great Depression as a parallel for the current turmoil, even those of us who fudged our way through introductory economics courses and normally line birdcages with the business section start wondering how the carnage on Wall Street will affect our small corners of the world. Baseball, one thinks, may have attained an unprecedented height — but from such a height, there’s nowhere to go but down.

Though this may be true, it need not be a disaster. As previously noted in this column, baseball does fairly well in hard times. Attendance — an admittedly imperfect proxy for the game’s overall health — has held steady or even grown during recessions dating back 60 years, an indicator of the sport’s broad popular appeal and relative affordability. Even at a pricey park, such as Chicago’s Wrigley Field, a 40-game season ticket plan in decent seats doesn’t cost much more than a fancy new television. Much-abused as he or she may be, the average citizen can still afford to watch men in silly costumes hit a ball with a stick.

It’s also worth putting into context any ills the game may face. From 1930 to 1933, during the era of the bank run and Pretty Boy Floyd, total attendance declined 40%, to 6.1 million from 10.1 million. In 1933, the St. Louis Browns drew 88,000 attendees ; the Philadelphia Athletics, purportedly fearing bankruptcy, traded Lefty Grove, Mickey Cochrane, and Max Bishop, among others, for cash. For anything like this to happen today, it would take an economic apocalypse that would make the sport basically irrelevant.

Still, there’s no reason to think that baseball can avoid the effects of a broad financial shock, or to think that whoever eventually succeeds 73-year-old commissioner, Bud Selig, won’t be dealing with them years from now. Figures like $6 billion and 80 million tickets may mainly reflect the sport’s popularity, but surely they were partly a consequence of the national fiscal drunkenness that has sent gold above $1,000 an ounce, oil above $100 per barrel, and the dollar below the Swiss franc. Baseball will no more be able to get by without a hangover than any other industry.

One area to keep an eye on is luxury box revenue. In the bigger cities, watching the games from a luxury box can cost $300,000 a year; this has been one of the key drivers of baseball’s economic boom. Teams playing in cities with big financial sectors, such as New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco, face the prospect of selling these boxes to a rapidly declining and increasingly nervous population of plutocrats and bigwigs.

To give an idea of scale here, the Yankees (according to filings associated with the billion-dollars worth of stadium construction bonds they issued in conjunction with New York City two years ago) anticipate $253 million in ticket and luxury box revenue next year in their new park. This is an increase of 161% from 2005’s $157 million figure, possible because the new Yankee Stadium has three times as many luxury boxes as the old one. So far as a decline in the number of extravagantly rich people effects a decline in the number of people willing to pay up to sit in a really fancy seat — and thus a slowing in the astonishing rate of revenue growth the sport has seen — baseball has a problem.

It also, though, has opportunities. The crises of the 1930s had awful effects on baseball. They also provoked the adoption of such lasting innovations as the farm system, night baseball, and radio broadcasting, and gave rise to an exceptional Yankees dynasty. The effect of all this, over time, was a better, fairer, and more competitive game.

If baseball, as a whole, can adopt wise policies, it can again turn a time of crisis to its advantage. With the Department of Energy forecasting that gas will cost $3.50 a gallon by spring, and with this number unlikely to decline for the foreseeable future, teams that focus on making it easier for their fans to use mass transit can profit. With the economy tanking, a sport that puts real energy into exporting itself to rising nations such as China can lay the ground for a new expansion. With broadcasting shifting from television to the Internet, baseball can continue to use this shift as a lever to force fairer distribution of money among the 30 teams. And perhaps most importantly, in a time of anxiety, baseball can — so long as it comports itself decently — secure its role as a stable cultural island in a time of torrential change. Will any of this affect a single outcome on the field this year? Not likely. But in the end, it may prove more important than the results of any game.

tmarchman@nysun.com