A minor adjustment in our baseball spending
TO USHER in the baseball season, my son and I attended a Major League game, a Triple-A game, and a Class-A game, allowing me to confirm two things that don't show up in the box scores.
First, with due respect to the American robin, baseball remains the best harbinger of spring. Second, baseball remains one of the best barometers of the American Spirit and, this season, of the economy.
In this spring of our economic discontent, many people are looking for low-cost, comforting forms of family entertainment - and there's no easier way to "Buy American" than to attend a baseball game. Yet, with every headline about corporate bailouts, lavish bonuses, and private jets, Americans are losing patience with financial foolery on all levels. Professional baseball is insulated but not immune.
No sport can equal the scope of pro baseball in America. The '09 season has already featured over 500 spring training games - and the fact that attendance was down only slightly provides cause for cautious optimism. Now Major League teams are in the first month of the regular season that includes 2,430 games, for which last year over 78 million tickets were sold.
More remarkable as a measure of pro baseball's reach is that the affiliated minor league system will play over 10,000 games. Last year, 43 million tickets were sold - the fifth consecutive year of record-setting attendance in the minors. And those numbers don't even include more than 1,000 games played by six independent leagues, featuring teams such as the Brockton Rox of the Can-Am League.
Many Major League clubs, including the Red Sox, have responded to the economic slump by freezing ticket prices and shedding some player payroll expenses. The Sox have little difficulty filling Fenway Park and should ride out this season comfortably, although corporate advertising is likely to dip. But in Milwaukee and Atlanta, the Brewers and Braves are already offering some seats for $1.
And then there are the Yankees and Mets, whose new taxpayer-assisted stadiums in New York are about as ill-timed as a new headquarters would be right now at
Baseball fans may not recognize bad mortgage deals, but they'll have no trouble spotting team owners who are out of touch with the times. Attendance could fall by as much as 10 percent this season, even as minor league attendance rises. Long before the economy collapsed, fans were discovering the simple pleasures and modest costs offered by minor league ball. For about what it costs to park your car at a Major League park, two people can buy tickets at most minor league venues and have enough left over for hot dogs and peanuts.
Of course, a bargain-priced bad time is no bargain at all, but in the minor leagues that's rarely the case. Smaller ballparks bring fans closer to the action. Reasonably-priced tickets attract more families to games, usually creating a more pleasant atmosphere. And most players, not yet spoiled by such things as the Twitter-ready computers mounted at every locker in the new Yankee Stadium clubhouse, seem to play hard, have fun, and appreciate the game on its most basic level.
The biggest difference between minor leaguers and their big-league counterparts is that while they may all be in it for multi-million-dollar contracts, at least minor leaguers play as if they have to work to earn it. Some Major League players and owners seem too much like Wall Street tycoons, waiting to collect big bonuses even when they strike out.
Americans won't reject baseball this summer, they'll cling to it. But baseball consumers are also savvy enough to avoid getting taken, out at the old ball game.
Peter Funt is a writer and TV host. 