Tag Archives: baseball

Do sports fans want shorter games, more action, or a higher action to time ratio?

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Baseball has taken significant steps this season to shorten the game through new features like a clock for pitchers and batters. A growing consensus over recent years has suggested fans want shorter games. College football is considering shortening games. However, in the absence of data I have encountered about what fans actually want, I wonder if it is really about shorter games. These might be two other options that sports fans in America want:

-More action. Studies have shown sports like baseball and football actually do not have much game action across the multiple hour experience. Pitch clocks make the action happen quicker but do not necessarily mean there will be more balls in play or runners on base. Baseball has moved in recent years to more three true outcomes: strikeouts, walks, and home runs. These involve limited action.

-A higher action to time ratio. Perhaps what fans want is not shorter time but more action within the time of the game. Shortening the time with no change to the action would provide a higher ratio. Shortened times plus more action would further increase the ratio. Other sports have more flow or continuous action, like hockey or soccer (though many American fans might consider these action low-stakes or boring action). Or, watching a condensed game where the time between all pitches or all football plays is removed can be an interesting experience.

I suspect there might be plenty of experimentation in the coming years regarding finding formulas for sports in order to retain or attract the attention of fans. This will also happen with ongoing interaction with other forms of entertainment that offer different experiences and timelines.

Two communities and two different approaches in advertising to baseball viewers

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What is the most effective way for a community to reach viewers of a baseball game? Here are two contrasting approaches on last night’s White Sox broadcast:

The Village of Bedford Park is not unknown to media consumers in the Chicago region; they advertise the advantages they provide for businesses, including plenty of water. The suburb has less than 1,000 residents but wants your business.

In this ad, there is little communicated about the Village outside of its name. Name recognition has some value; the Chicago area has hundreds of suburbs and knowing this small suburb could be consequential.

Contrast this approach with that of Sarasota. A bigger community of over 50,000 residents, the suburb emphasizes “beaches and beyond.” This could be aimed at tourists, visitors who bring in money to hotels, property owners, restaurants, stores, and more, or people who might want to relocate to a land of beaches.

This approach is more common when communities advertise. Including the name, a tagline or motto, and some sort of image – here Sarasota in a particular script and with a flowing tee – aims for name recognition and some knowledge about the community.

Are either of these approaches effective for baseball fans watching the game? Do they decide to take their business to Bedford Park or visit Sarasota? Many communities now advertise and engage in branding in similar ways but it would still be interesting to hear officials in both of these communities discuss the merits and return on investment of these marketing approaches.

If every life event was sponsored, baseball edition

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I enjoy listening to baseball games on the radio. The pace of the game, the voices of the announcers, and the ability to do other things while listening add up to an enjoyable experience.

Photo by Anthony on Pexels.com

Except for one growing trend: the number of commercial reads throughout the game. At this point, it seems like almost every baseball event has a sponsor. Strikeouts, walks, doubles, home runs, the fifth inning, the seventh inning…you get the idea. Baseball has a lot of small events and apparently they can be attached to an advertiser for the right price.

I am aware of multiple factors behind this. Radio is a dying business. Live sports is one of the few shining spots where there are certain to be listeners (or viewers). Commercialization is alive and well. There is money to be made here.

But, I can only imagine how this might spread to all areas of life. Go beyond the Internet and social media ads tied to your browsing and shopping habits. You tie your shoes; brought to you by [blank]. You run the dishwasher; brought to you by [blank]. You read a book; brought to you by [blank].

At this point, there do not seem to be any officials guardrails against more and more of this happening. People can push back but this has consequences. If I do not like the baseball ads, I can stop listening. But, if we move to more immersive devices – Google Glass, virtual reality headsets, a house full of Internet equipped objects – this will be very hard to push against or escape.

Oakland, do not give in to the A’s ask for tax payer money for a new stadium

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As the 2022 baseball season is underway, so is the quest by owners to get public money to fund a new stadium. From Oakland, California:

Photo by Griffin Wooldridge on Pexels.com

By 2020, the A’s were the only team left. But they made it clear they were prepared to leave, too. Last May, majority owner John Fisher and team president Dave Kaval—resident cartoon villains of what remains of the Oakland sports scene—began threatening to follow in the Raiders’ footsteps and relocate Oakland’s last pro team to Las Vegas … unless the Oakland City Council voted to help them build a $12 billion stadium “district”—replete with condos, hotels, and apartment buildings—on a wedge of waterfront property operated by the Port of Oakland just west of Jack London Square. If approved, the project would constitute one of the largest and most transformative development deals in California state history. It would likewise require hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding to complete. Fisher, who is heir to the Gap Inc. fortune and has a net worth north of $2 billion, has committed to privately finance the construction of the stadium itself, but the project isn’t viable without a suite of infrastructure improvements to the surrounding area. These improvements are what the A’s asked the city to find ways to pay for.

It was a familiar ploy. As journalists Neil deMause and Joanna Cagan write in Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit, since roughly 1984, when the Colts left Baltimore for Indianapolis, team owners across the country have worked systematically to “supplement profits by extorting money from their hometowns,” usually “under threat of moving.” Starting around last summer, Fisher and Kaval began to expand upon their means of municipal extortion. In the run-up to a series of contentious City Council meetings, Kaval took to posting videos of himself on Twitter jubilantly attending Las Vegas Knights games, as if to spur the city into supporting his proposal out of jealous insecurity. Fisher, meanwhile, enlisted MLB commissioner Rob Manfred to act as muscle. “Thinking about this as a bluff is a mistake,” Manfred told the BWAA in July 2021. “This is the decision point for Oakland as to whether they want Major League Baseball going forward.”

Oakland has been struggling to make that decision ever since. Some, like Marcus Thompson, an East Oakland native, 2021 California Sportswriter of the Year, and author of Golden: The Miraculous Rise of Steph Curry,resent Fisher and Kaval’s tactics, and say that Oakland’s political leaders “should not be caving to an owner” worth over $2 billion who has “shown zero desire to be a meaningful member of our community unless it is profitable.” Certain Oakland political leaders, such as Councilmember Carroll Fife, who represents the district in West Oakland where the A’s stadium would be built, agree. “There are so many dire issues in Oakland right now,” Fife told me in February—citing, among other things, Oakland’s crises of gentrification, affordability, and homelessness, which the United Nations has singled out as “cruel.” Fife said she doesn’t believe “a sports team is going to address” any of them. “We should use public resources toward addressing residents’ immediate needs.”

Others believe the economic benefits of a new stadium are worth pursuing in and of themselves. “Building the new A’s ballpark would be a blessing,” Mitchell Schwarzer, historian, professor, and author of Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption, told me in an email. It would “bring crowds to adjacent Jack London Square,” and fill “its vacant spaces with places to eat, drink and shop.” Oakland’s mayor, Libby Schaaf, agrees, calling the A’s stadium project “a world-class waterfront ballpark district” with the potential to “benefit Bay Area residents for generations to come.”

No major city or leader wants to lose a major sports team. And the Oakland case is unique with multiple teams leaving in recent years.

However, the price that is often paid to keep a team is not worth it. The costs are too big, taxpayers lose other opportunities, the money would be spent elsewhere in the city if not at sporting events, and the owners are the ones who truly win with the increasing value of their team.

The Oakland case is also different because of the way the Athletics are run. The team has a Billy Beane approach that suggests an excellent team can be created with a limited payroll and an ability to exploit market inefficiencies. The A’s have done this a few times in the last two decades…and then they sell off all of their good players and start again. They just did this going into the 2022 season and have a minimal payroll of just under $50 million, second-lowest in baseball and roughly one-fifth of the biggest spenders in the sport. In addition to the economic case for taxpayers, is this a team worth supporting?

Sports stadiums and white flight

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How the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta United went about procuring their stadiums hints at the city’s racial divides:

Accompanying the announcement, the team released a map showing where, precisely, Braves Country was—and, notably, where it wasn’t. That view of the greater Atlanta area was speckled with red dots, each one indicating the home of a 2012 ticket buyer, including season-ticket holders. Only a smattering of red appeared to the east, west and south of Turner Field, while thousands of dots congealed into a ribbon above downtown that expanded into a wide swath in the half-dozen suburban and exurban counties to the north. The new stadium would be closer to the middle of that mass, which happened to embody an older, whiter and more conservative population than the city proper. Those northern suburbs were fast diversifying, yet many in Atlanta—particularly in its black population—felt slighted by the decision, their perspectives colored by decades of racial and political tension between city and sprawl.

Five months later MLS commissioner Don Garber, Falcons owner Arthur Blank and then-mayor Kasim Reed proclaimed in their own press conference that downtown Atlanta would be home to MLS’s 22nd franchise, and the new club, Atlanta United, would take the pitch in 2017, the same year the Braves headed to Cobb. The soccer team would play in the same new $1.6 billion stadium the Falcons would soon call home, but United would be no afterthought. The facility would be designed to accommodate the beautiful game from the start. Pushing back against skepticism and pointing to an influx of young professionals near Atlanta’s urban core, Blank assured MLS’s leaders he could fill the massive venue, even in a market known for lukewarm enthusiasm toward pro sports. Reed boasted that his city’s foreign-born (and, seemingly implied, soccer-loving) population was growing at the second-fastest rate in the U.S. Garber himself insisted these factors combined to make downtown an ideal MLS incubator. The city “embodies what we call a ‘new America,'” he said, “an America that’s blossoming with ethnic diversity.”

Fast-forward five years, and Atlanta United’s ticket-sales map, while not a direct inverse, is considerably more centralized than Braves Country (or even, says United president Darren Eales, a depiction of the Falcons’ fan base). United, meanwhile, aided no doubt by winning the 2018 MLS Cup, has led MLS in attendance in each of its three seasons, averaging 53,003 fans in ’19, among the highest in the world. This echoes the success the Braves found when they chased their audience to the north, the farthest any MLB team had ventured from its city center in 50 years. The Braves’ average home attendance, aided too by on-field success, reached 32,779 fans this season, up 31% from their last year at Turner Field…

Kruse, the Princeton history professor, is blunt in his assessment of such feelings. “These ideas about downtown being a dangerous place are really about the people downtown,” he says. For years he thought that “suburbanites want nothing to do with the city except to see the Braves.” But today? “That last connection has been severed. I see this movement of the stadium as the culmination of white flight.”

Trying to connect with particular fan bases or contributing to decades-long processes of residential segregation and white flight? How about both?

Three additional thoughts:

  1. More could be made here of the public money the Braves received from Cobb County. Plus, they could develop land around the new stadium, now a common tactic to generate more revenue beyond fan attendance. Yes, fan attendance is important but the long-term money may be in investing money in land surrounded by whiter and wealthier residents. Stadium development then just continues the process of limited capital investment in neighborhoods that could really use it and concentrates it in places where wealth is already present.
  2. Baseball is widely regarded as having an older and whiter fan base. Soccer is said to have a more diverse and younger fan base. In addition to the demographics of the Atlanta area, the sports themselves try to appeal to different audiences (even as they might work to reach out to different groups).
  3. It will be interesting to see how many sports teams in the next few decades move to more niche locations while still claiming to be from the big city. Civic identity is often tied to sports teams as most metro areas can only support one team from the major American sports. Can big city politicians still lose when the team from the area decides to move to a suburb (see a recent example in the Las Vegas area) but takes that revenue out of the big city? Can a team that locates in one particular area of the metropolitan region still easily represent the entire region?

Baseball teams going with smaller stadiums, more mixed-use development

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As fewer fans may be willing to go to baseball games, teams are moving toward focusing on development around the stadium:

The Atlanta Braves and Texas Rangers, leaning significantly on public funding that came without taxpayer referendums, ditched parks built in the 1990s for smaller digs framed by the game’s new revenue engine – mixed-use developments at least partially controlled by the team. The Braves are in their third season at SunTrust Park (capacity, 41,000, replacing Turner Field’s 53,000) while the Rangers in 2020 will open Globe Life Field, a retractable-roof facility that will seat 40,000 compared to its predecessor’s 49,000-seat capacity…

For the Diamondbacks, A’s and perhaps a significant number of clubs that may replace – or revamp – their Camden Yards-era parks, finding the sweet spot of atmosphere, accessibility and inclusion will be paramount in a sport with an aging and occasionally alienated fan base.

The primary focus of the article is on how teams are trying to attract more fans to altered ballparks that offer a more exciting in-game experience. But, I find the passage above more interesting: as fans become fickle regarding attendance, the big long-term money may just be in the real estate surrounding the park. Even at high levels of attendance, a sports stadium only generates revenue a certain number of dates a year. Baseball has a lot more dates than football but the stadium still sits empty for more than 75% of the year.

Many teams and park owners have already shifted toward stadiums as concert venues as well as homes to other sports in the off-season. But, imagine the sports stadium more like an exciting shopping mall where people come to hang out in an exciting and safe space and they consume. Just like the shopping mall that features food, entertainment, and retail, the stadium could become a year-round home for entertainment, food, and shopping that has a great draw at the center: a professional sports team that happens to play there for part of the year.

One piece that may be missing from a number of ballparks as well as shopping malls: adding residential units near the facility could help boost the customer base and create a neighborhood feel. A number of stadiums are surrounded by parking lots. At least a few are located right next to other stadiums of professional teams so the stadiums can share parking lots. Instead, imagine apartments and condos right near stadiums: some residents would be excited to live right near the energy of a stadium and these residents also would partake of local businesses. This does not have to look like the neighborhood around Wrigley Field but there is certainly a lot of room for more neighborhoods to generate revenues for tams long after the games are over.

And then there can be conversations about whether public money should be used to finance real estate development in addition to sports stadiums. Do communities benefit from mixed-use developments around stadiums or does the money line the pockets of owners?

A reminder of the absurdity of sports

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The MVP Machine is a good look at the data feedback player development angle in Major League Baseball today. Roughly two-thirds through the book, there is a reminder about what sports actually are:

It also strikes me as silly that I’m so excited about being a bit better at hitting a ball covered in cowhide with a wooden stick, an ultimately meaningless activity that American culture collectively decided would be worth many millions of dollars when performed with a certain skill. Rational or not, though, the fulfillment is real.

Similar descriptions could render all major sports as absurdist activities. And yet, they are viewed by millions, they are tied to local status and civic togetherness, and there are billions of dollars tied up in them. Sports today are big business, big entertainment, and big stakes for fans all rolled up into one. But, I imagine some sports moments could be made better with this reminder of what sports are at their most basic level.

Henderson, NV: do not go all in with public money for a baseball stadium

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The large Las Vegas suburb of Henderson is interested in acquiring a major league baseball team and willing to use a lot of taxpayer dollars to do it:

Renderings show a retractable-roof baseball stadium near St. Rose Parkway and Bermuda Road in rapidly growing west Henderson, which city officials envision as a hub for sports and entertainment. The proposed site, one of four floated by the city, sits behind the future headquarters and practice facility of the NFL’s Raiders.

According to the presentation, Henderson hired a consultant to conduct a financial analysis, assuming the ballpark would have 32,000 seats and space for 4,000 standing-room-only ticket holders. The Diamondbacks would serve as the primary tenant for a 30-year term and the stadium would be publicly owned and exempt from property tax.

The consultant estimated the ballpark would cost about $1 billion to construct…

The Diamondbacks expressed interest in creating a development at a potential new home, pointing to the entertainment district near the Atlanta Braves’ SunTrust Park as inspiration, according to documents that detailed the team’s wish list for prospective suitors.

The city said it ultimately views itself as capable of drawing major sports franchises because of a business-friendly approach, attractive demographics, socioeconomic characteristics and available land.

It sounds like the suburb of over 300,000 residents sees at least three benefits of such a move:

1. It would boost the status of the suburb. Few suburbs could boast of a collection like this with an MLB team, an NFL practice facility, and an ice rink connected to an NHL team. This could then help attract businesses and residents.

2. The potential for development around a major league stadium. Imagine restaurants, retailers, and residences near the stadium.

3. Becoming a unique location with a growing metropolitan region. As suburbs compete for corporate headquarters, residents, retailers, and entertainment centers, a stadium would stand out. It is easy for critics to stereotypes as collections of subdivisions and strip malls but Henderson would have a different collection of sites.

Yet, the research is clear: sports stadiums enrich sports teams, not communities. Suburbs that have tried this tend to run into problems (see recent examples of Glendale, Arizona and Bridgeview, Illinois). Teams will use cities and suburbs against each other to get better deals – just as big companies like Amazon do – and also leave those places behind if they can get better deals.

So before Henderson throws up to a billion dollars at a major league team, they should think twice. Can the suburb handle that amount of debt if it does not work out? Could that money be spent elsewhere on development and/or amenities that would benefit a broader swath of their residents? Is being a high-status suburb more important than being a quality place to live?

Minor league baseball stadiums are not good for economic development

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Camden, New Jersey just decided to tear down a baseball stadium that is less than twenty years old. The stadium did not lead to economic development and no team has played there for several years:

Taxpayers spent more than $18 million to build the stadium that would eventually be named Campbell’s Field, as part of a minor league ballpark-building frenzy across New Jersey that saw similar stadiums erected in Newark, Atlantic City, and Somerset—all part of redevelopment schemes that attracted independent minor league teams (that is, minor league teams not affiliated with the Major League Baseball farm system)…

The sad saga of the Camden Riversharks—the Atlantic League team for whom the stadium was built prior to the 2001 season—will come to an official end more than three years after the team picked up and moved to New Britain, Connecticut, leaving Campbell’s Field vacant. The city tried to attract a new team, but after those efforts failed, the Camden County Improvement Authority signed off on a plan to demolish the stadium, according to NJ.com. The Riversharks and Campbell’s Field were supposed to revitalize the impoverished city by being the centerpiece of an economic development plan along the edge of the Delaware River. Now, the demolition of the stadium is the first step in a new $15 million economic development scheme that will turn the site into a complex of athletic fields for Rutgers University’s Camden campus, NJ.com reports…

In the team’s final two seasons, the Riversharks averaged about 3,000 fans per game—which is actually not bad by the standards of independent minor league baseball—but the team never turned a profit and abruptly skipped town in 2015 when negotiations on a new lease stalled.

By then, the ballpark was so deep in debt that it faced foreclosure because the team had missed several lease payments. To bail it out, Camden paid off $3.5 million in outstanding debt and purchased the property. The city planned to impose a new ticket surcharge to cover those costs, but the city only received one payment from the team before it moved away, NJ.com reported last year.

This is a consistent story with sports stadiums: they primarily benefit the teams and their owners, not communities. Local officials and politicians want to be the ones who can say they helped keep a sports team in town or they attracted a new franchise but using public dollars for this effort is not a good investment in the long run.

While the story is not quite the same with tax breaks for corporations, there are some parallels. Communities often want to jumpstart economic development. New businesses, particularly headquarters or large office buildings, as well as stadiums can appear to be good ways to do this. They bring jobs, something every local leader supports. They bring increased status for a community, a less quantifiable feature but still important as communities jockey to attract additional firms and residents. Thus, communities are willing to offer tax breaks in a variety of ways – sometimes to help construct infrastructure, sometimes provided per job created, sometimes to construct the stadium – to beat out other communities. The question of whether the community benefits in tangible ways in the years to come is not often raised.

A related earlier post: championships won by sports teams do not necessarily lead to better outcomes in cities.

If golf and football are dying sports, what would happen to that land?

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I recently discussed NIMBY responses to redevelopment of golf courses but this had me thinking more broadly about land dedicated to sports and recreation: what happens to the land if the activity becomes less popular?

Golf was the sport cited in the CityLabs article:

Golf is dying, many experts say. According to one study by the golf industry group Pellucid Corp., the number of regular golfers fell from 30 to 20.9 million between 2002 and 2016. Ratings are down, equipment sales are lagging, and the number of rounds played annually has fallen.

Part of the bust can be blamed on the fallen fortunes of a single person: Tiger Woods. Golf boomed in the 1990s and early 2000s as the charismatic superstar raked in titles. Then, beginning in 2009, it faced a one-two punch of recession and bad press when its star golfer’s chronic infidelity came to light.

But the bigger story involves the sport’s aging demographics and the athletic tastes of Millennials, who just aren’t that into an expensive, poky sport that provides few health benefits. Unless the golf industry can change its ways, the decline will mean a lot of empty greens across the country. How that land is used—or isn’t—could reshape America’s suburbs for decades to come.

Beyond golf, the next sport that comes to mind is football. If youth leagues continue to see a decline in participation, less park and school land would be needed for football fields. What would then happen to that space? For a good number of high schools, that land is already shared with sports like soccer and lacrosse. Park space could simply become large fields again. But, some football facilities could be turned over to other uses (and cause NIMBY issues similar to those faced by golf course redevelopment).

What other sports could be next? Baseball still has a lot of young players but imagine that participation dries up in a few decades. Baseball fields can take up a lot of space. Could there be sports that arise and take up some of this space? Nice basketball courts would be welcomed in many places but neighbors and communities often have concerns about building these. I can think of several lesser known sports but cannot realistically imagine they would become so popular as to take up public park space or space at schools. But, perhaps parks in a few decades will include a much wider variety of sports fields and spaces to better serve a fragmented sports playing populace.

Sports spaces come and go over time. Bowling alleys thrived decades ago but now are more sparse. Skate parks started a few decades ago and now are found in many American community. Large cities have spent millions on helping to fund sports arenas but this could stop as communities realize who benefits from the stadiums. Is it too far-fetched to imagine that in a few decades very few people will play sports outdoors due to a combination of a lack of interest in physical activity, inside facilities, e-sports, and simulators that could provide similar experiences? Could parks and outdoor spaces become exclusively about “natural settings” and open land?