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Baseball now mirrors NBA, NHL; teams try discount ticket schemes to bring fans out to parks early in the season
Insight on the News, June 24, 2002 by Eric Fisher
The defining note in baseball's season this spring has been the large swath of empty seats in ballparks coast to coast. Nine stadiums in all have posted their worst crowds in the season's first month, a terrible indicator of the game's health.
Poor attendance no doubt owes greatly to the game's rising ticket prices and an off-season that saw Major League Baseball try to kill the Minnesota and Montreal franchises, send hated owner Jeffrey Loria to Florida and ultimately take over the Expos itself.
But fans have shown up to watch baseball in tough times before, and even with this season's attendance down about 8 percent, 70 million will attend a game sometime this season. Off-season ticket sales for 2002 indicate that many slower-starting teams, such as Houston and Cleveland, will rebound.
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All this suggests that baseball, on top of all its other problems, also is learning a painful lesson now part of the normal business cycles in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Hockey League (NHL): the late-arriving fan.
In all three sports, the regular season is a six-month marathon that at times seems interminable. Though a game in the first week of the season counts in the standings the same as one in the last week, NHL and NBA fans long have found it difficult to get excited about games before Christmas.
"It just takes a while for the story for each team and each league to develop;' says Declan Bolger, senior vice president of business operations for the Washington Capitals and a former employee of the Pittsburgh Pirates. "When you have 81 home dates, or 41 dates, in front of you, it's very easy for a fan to procrastinate."
Many NBA and NHL clubs combat the early-season fan resistance by more aggressively promoting those games, packaging them into bulk ticket plans with more attractive games later on and stacking the giveaway schedule more heavily in the season's first half. The NHL has shown some success with this strategy, drawing its most even spread of fans this season in many years.
Can baseball repeat the feat? Several teams, most notably St. Louis, Colorado and San Francisco, are attempting to break out of the rut. The Cardinals, Rockies and Giants have rolled out variable ticket pricing for 2002, placing their trust directly in the economic laws of supply and demand. Tickets for each team are more expensive for prime weekend summer games and less so for early-season midweek contests.
Other teams have done less extensive ventures on the same idea. With $1 upper-deck tickets, discounted concessions and the New York Yankees in town, Oakland drew an Oakland Coliseum-record 54,513 in mid-April.
It's a simple premise and one that Broadway, ski resorts and amusement parks have used for years. Sports leagues, however, traditionally have resisted variable pricing or deep discounts because it places value judgments on opponents that not only could be deemed offensive but also not hold true. New realities, however, require new thinking.
"Many teams are working on more discount programs for the earlier dates, the less obvious high-demand dates," says Matt Dryer, director of sales for the Baltimore Orioles. Baltimore is holding numerous bargain nights this season, mostly before the All-Star break.
But as novel as the new ticket plans may be, there's one headline guaranteed to draw more fans all year long: "Players, owners reach labor deal."
Just don't count on it.
ERIC FISHER WRITES FOR Insight's SISTER DAILY, THE WASHINGTON TIMES.
COPYRIGHT 2002 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
