Baseball and Firestone, the big tire company, have a deep historical connection: in the 1920s Harvey Firestone built a ballpark in Akron, Ohio, for his employees, and Babe Ruth supposedly came and played. But until now, Major League Baseball and Firestone had done little business together. Firestone, which in the past has mainly limited its sports sponsorships to auto racing, has reached a five-year, multimillion-dollar deal with MLB to become the official sponsor of the sport's All-Star balloting next season. The deal also includes national advertising during broadcasts and in print publications at stadiums. For Firestone, it's the first nonracing sponsorship in 25 years, and for MLB the deal is reassurance that it can still sell big-time sponsorships amid the economic downturn, even as attendance slipped last season. 'I think what we saw was that there were two phases to the recession,' said Tim Brosnan, MLB's executive vice president for business, who explained that the first half of the season was more severely affected by the economy. 'As baseball got toward its postseason, the business picked up markedly.' The league, Brosnan said, responded to the downturn by beefing up its advertising sales force, while cutting expenses elsewhere. According to Baseball-Reference.com, about 5 million fewer fans attended big league baseball games in 2009, compared with 2008. Last season, total attendance was 73.4 million, down from 78.5 million in 2008. (In the early years of the Great Depression, attendance declined roughly 40 percent.) 'I would have expected attendance would have gone down more,' said Vince Gennaro, a business consultant for several teams and the author of 'Diamond Dollars: the Economics of Winning in Baseball.' Gennaro noted that 10 Major League Baseball teams reduced ticket prices in 2009. 'So revenue may have been down at a rate greater than attendance,' he said. The idea behind the partnership between Firestone and MLB is to emphasize the deep roots each has in American life. 'From our perspective, the tradition of Firestone and the tradition of MLB go together perfectly,' said John Baratta, president of consumer tire replacement sales for Bridgestone Americas. Bridgestone, a Japanese company, owns the Firestone brand, having purchased the company in 1988. To dig into that history, MLB asked a researcher at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., to find out details about Firestone Stadium, which opened in 1925. Luckily for the architects of the partnership between baseball and Firestone, the researcher found that Babe Ruth supposedly played at the ballpark during a barnstorming tour in the 1920s. (Today the ballpark is home to the Akron Acers of the women's National Pro Fastpitch Softball League.) 'We're about tradition, we're about history,' said John Brody, a senior vice president at MLB, describing the marketing rationale for the deal. 'What we stand for to our fans is what Firestone stands for with their customer.' Brosnan added: 'At a very elementary level it is a partnership between two iconic American brands.' Firestone joins companies like General Motors, Taco Bell, State Farm and Bank of America that have wide-ranging sponsorship deals with MLB. 'This is typical of the kinds of sponsorships we do where you need to be 'all in,'' Brosnan said. 'All in means you make a significant investment, and not just at our jewel events, but in TV advertising, in print publications, and you take it retail.' Firestone, which is producing two baseball-themed television commercials for next season, will also take the baseball connection to the local level. It will install in-store promotions related to baseball at its 7,500 outlets across the country, and the All Star balloting facet of the deal extends not just to the big league ballparks, but to more than 100 minor league ballparks as well. 'Every community has baseball, from Little League on up,' said Baratta, the Bridgestone executive. In addition to playing up the linked history between baseball and Firestone for marketing purposes, Baratta said that going beyond auto racing would allow the company to broaden its reach. 'The demographics of MLB mirror the U.S. population closer than any other sports entity,' he said. 