October 5 in business history: a cigar town on 40 acres, thirteen free World Series, and a trade deal the United States left
Three October 5s — the 1885 contract that moved Florida's cigar industry from Key West to a new town outside Tampa, the first World Series carried on radio in 1921, and the twelve-country Trans-Pacific Partnership concluded in 2015 — show that whoever sets the terms for how a product travels keeps most of what it earns.
Three 5 Octobers, and on each one a business settled who else would handle what it made: a cigar manufacturer who moved his operation out of Key West in 1885, two ballclubs who let radio carry the World Series for nothing in 1921, and twelve governments whose trade agreement the United States abandoned fifteen months after finishing it in 2015.
The terms set on those days decided who kept the money.
Forty acres outside Tampa
On 5 October 1885 the cigar manufacturer Vicente Martinez Ybor agreed with the Tampa Board of Trade to move his hand-rolled cigar business out of Key West, and bought forty acres northeast of the town 1.
Spanish and Cuban workers in his Key West plant fought each other, and getting the product out was hard; Tampa offered a new port, a rail link and, because Ybor could house his own workers, far more control over labor 1.
Ybor, Ignacio Haya and the other manufacturers laid out the district themselves, and Ybor built small houses, the casitas, that workers could buy at cost 1.
By 1910 the Tampa area held more than two hundred cigar factories making over a million cigars a day with Cuban, Spanish and Italian labor 12. Strikes, mechanization and the Depression's collapse in demand for fine cigars emptied them; by the early 1950s the factories were gone, with Interstate 4 later routed through the district 3.
Decision mirror: the board of trade's instruments of 1885 are now the city's tax breaks. Ybor City's 133 acres became a Community Redevelopment Area in June 1988, using tax-increment financing, preservation credits and impact-fee reductions to pull private capital back into the same blocks 3.
Thirteen free World Series
Game 1 of the 1921 World Series began at two in the afternoon on Wednesday 5 October at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. The Yankees beat the Giants 3–0 in an hour and 38 minutes before 30,203 people, Carl Mays pitching a five-hit shutout 4.
It was the first World Series carried on radio, by KDKA in Pittsburgh, WJZ in Newark and WBZ in Springfield. KDKA came live from the ballpark; the Newark station ran a telephone line from a reporter in the stands to an engineer in a studio. Westinghouse built those stations to sell radio sets, which went for about $60, or $815 in 2021 money 456.
National League owners voted to stop World Series coverage, fearing lost ticket sales; the new commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, overruled them and opened the games to any station that wanted them. The networks supplied their own announcers and paid the AT&T line charges, running the games unsponsored, so the first thirteen World Series went out free 5.
Decision mirror: the first money came in 1934, when Landis sold the World Series to the Ford Motor Company for $100,000, 42 per cent of it to the players. After Main Street Sports, the former Diamond Sports Group, missed rights payments, nine clubs terminated their contracts in January 2026, and the league's own media division now produces local broadcasts for 15 teams 57.
Twelve countries, then eleven
On 5 October 2015 the trade ministers of twelve Pacific economies announced in Atlanta that they had concluded the Trans-Pacific Partnership after more than five years of talks, a bloc covering nearly 40 per cent of the world economy. The trade representative's own summary dates the announcement to 4 October, when the round ended, and President Obama described a deal that would remove "more than 18,000 taxes" other countries put on American goods 8910.
The membership rule made the United States indispensable: after two years the agreement would enter into force on ratification by six members holding more than 85 per cent of the group's output, and America alone held most of that 11.
The deal was signed in Auckland on 4 February 2016. On 23 January 2017 President Trump signed a memorandum withdrawing the United States, and the agreement lapsed 12.
Decision mirror: the other eleven kept the text. They signed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership in Santiago on 8 March 2018 and brought it into force on 30 December 2018, suspending provisions on investment and intellectual property that the Americans had insisted on. The United Kingdom joined as the twelfth member on 15 December 2024, and the bloc's economies now come to about 14.4 per cent of world GDP, some $15.8 trillion 1314.
Three questions for the day
- Who sets the terms? Tampa's board of trade gave Ybor land, a port and a free hand; a century later the city was paying to bring business back down the same streets 13.
- What is free worth later? The first thirteen World Series went out free, and the first paid sponsorship, in 1934, was $100,000 5.
- What does walking away cost the one who wrote the rules? The United States set the TPP's terms and left, and the other eleven kept them 1213.
References
- 1
- 2Florida Memory, "The Cigar Industry Changes Florida"
floridamemory.com
- 3City of Tampa, "Ybor City History"
tampa.gov
- 4Wikipedia, "1921 World Series"
en.wikipedia.org
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11Wikipedia, "Trans-Pacific Partnership"
en.wikipedia.org
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