In an exit poll conducted after Michigan’s Republican presidential primary, more voters cited the economy as their top concern, more so than terrorism, the war in Iraq, and immigration combined. One in five said they were falling behind financially, and seven in 10 said the economy was “not so good” or “poor.”

One would suppose that in lean times, especially in a state as economically ravaged as Michigan, a ballgame would be a hard sell. But one would be wrong: Last Tuesday, the very day of the primary, the Detroit News reported that the Tigers, on the strength of their recent trade for Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis, are running out of seats. “We’re having conversations about having to cut off our season ticket sales,” crowed general manager Dave Dombrowski.

There is a lesson here, and it has to do with more than the notable lack of outrage Detroit fans feel toward such confessed and proven cheats as BALCO client Gary Sheffield and ball-scuffer Kenny Rogers. With many economists saying that America is already in recession, and nearly all saying that if it isn’t, it soon will be, most people would assume that baseball will soon be in for a hard time. That likely isn’t a good bet.

Baseball sells many tickets to many different sorts of people. In a recession, many fans will no doubt forego games as an unnecessary expense. But season tickets are sold to a stable base of institutions and well-off fans who are relatively less burdened by unaffordable mortgages, and large car payments, for example. Attendance is a less important source of money than it once was, because of television and the Internet. And while baseball games are expensive, so are other forms of entertainment. A season-ticket package doesn’t cost any more than a fancy new television. An afternoon at Chicago’s Wrigley Field needn’t cost all that much more than an afternoon at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.

Moreover, in historical terms, recession has been, if anything, good for baseball. Since the end of World War II, five recessions have started during the off-season and lasted into the season. None of them harmed attendance at all: Baseball fans are a hardy and dedicated lot.

In 1948, 16 teams drew a total of 21 million fans, an average of 1.3 million per team. In November, the economy tipped into a recession that lasted until October of the next year. During 1949, attendance held steady at 1.26 million per team. These are figures baseball didn’t regularly exceed for another 40 years, until the 1978 expansion led to great gains in popularity in the teeth of yet more negative growth: In 1980, during a recession that lasted from January until July, attendance rose from 1979’s 1.6 million fans per team to 1.7 million. Every team in the National League drew at least a million fans that year.

Examples abound. In 1969, the 24 teams drew 1.15 million fans per team. During a recession that began that December, and lasted until November 1970, attendance increased to 1.25 million per team. More recently in 2000, baseball set a new attendance record at 73 million; the next year, despite a meltdown in technology stocks, it drew 73 million again.

Baseball isn’t the same business it was 60 years ago, but there doesn’t seem to be much reason to think that Derek Jeter and David Wright will be reduced to personally hawking tickets at Grand Central in the near future. The oft-cited possibility that Citigroup may prove too broke to pay the $50 million annual fee it owes for naming rights to the Mets’ new stadium, and the collapse of the Tribune Company’s ongoing, flailing attempts to sell the Cubs, are examples of the sorts of things that baseball will actually have to worry about in a bad economic climate. Neither is, in the end, all that big a deal.

Ominously, though, while none of the recessions mentioned here were associated with bad attendance, all of them (except the first) were followed by labor problems. In 1973 and 1976, owners locked players out. In 1981, players struck. In 2001, Bud Selig notoriously threatened to shut down several teams, and a strike looked quite likely. This could be coincidental — but it could also well be that in uncertain times, both management and labor are willing to fight more tenaciously. There won’t be a strike or anything of the sort this year. But with various ongoing congressional investigations looking like the sort that could, at any time, provoke open, intrabaseball warfare, there will be plenty of opportunities for baseball’s captains to prove yet again how badly they could handle the sport’s prosperity.

tmarchman@nysun.com