If Depression-era ballplayers as a whole were better educated, more businesslike, and less amenable to verbal harangues, few of them were paid enough that they could afford to remain idle in the off-season. Some picked up extra cash by barnstorming in the fall, but most players pursued a great variety of off-season occupations. In the early 1930s, Phillies pitcher Phil Collins worked as a butcher in Chicago; Washington third baseman Joe Judge ran an automobile-repair shop in the District of Columbia; Cincinnati pitcher Eppa Rixey sold insurance; Ad Liska, who pitched for the Senators and Phillies, worked in a Philadelphia jewelry store; and Dazzy Vance operated a hotel and served as a fishing and hunting guide in Homosassa Springs, Florida. Clarence Mitchell, who finally retired in 1932 after eighteen big-league seasons as a left-handed spitballer, owned a farm in Nebraska, where he trained greyhounds to chase and catch coyotes, whose pelts he sold locally. After he finally made it to the majors, Jim Turner continued to run a milk-delivery business with his uncle in Nashville.

For minor leaguers, some source of off-season income was a necessity. Jim Bivin, who had a 2–9 record for the 1935 Phillies and was sold to Baltimore, spent the winter of 1935/1936 working on a freighter operating between the East Coast of the United States and British ports. Four years later, a number of minor leaguers residing in New York State took advantage of that state's unemployment compensation program and drew $50 to $60 per month in benefits. But when Cleveland third baseman Ken Keltner, who'd been paid $7,500 during the 1939 season, applied for unemployment compensation in Ohio, he came under fire in the baseball press. After his application was rejected, Keltner lamely claimed that the whole thing had been a gag, but Dan Daniel, for one, insisted that Indians owner Alva Bradley ought to give Keltner "a going over." [Sporting News, December 7, 1939, p. 4.]

Often ballplayers sought to help out their families in the midst of hard times. In 1932, for example, Woody English was paid $14,000 and gained a World Series loser's share. With his season's earnings he, paid $8,000 in cash for a farm outside Newark, Ohio, for his grandparents and made a $2,500 down payment on a house in Newark for his mother before indulging himself with a new Packard convertible. Burgess Whitehead used his 1934 World Series share to help his parents keep their tobacco farm in Tarboro, North Carolina, and Blondy Ryan, whose father was a policeman in Lynn, Massachusetts, spent his 1933 Series check on a house for his parents. Billy Rogell's salary, which topped out at $15,000 in 1935, supported not only his wife and himself but his wife's parents and his unemployed brother's family.

Ballplayers of that day tended to be outdoor types who spent much of the off-season fishing and hunting. Tramping through woods and over hills, maybe playing some golf, watching one's weight, and staying out of saloons were usually considered sufficient in the way of off-season conditioning, although urban residents sometimes worked out at local YMCAs. But arduous regimens designed to build muscle mass were anathema in baseball circles, where the conventional wisdom held that it wasn't mass but suppleness that mattered.

Jimmie Foxx was especially renowned for his powerful upper-body build, but in 1934 the Athletics' young strongman said that he didn't want to "[run] the risk of becoming musclebound." While he played off-season golf and did other exercises "that tend to give me a muscle tone and quick muscular coordination," he avoided "anything that I would call heavy exercise . . . which develops muscle at the expense of agility." [“The Secret of Jimmy [sic] Foxx’s Slugging Power,” Baseball Magazine, September 1934, p. 394.]

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