The Million-Dollar Lottery Idea
Interview #2
I was talking with a hockey teammate of mine recently and mentioned that I was writing and researching what attracts fans to baseball these days. This New York native, we’ll use the name William for this story, is now a long-term resident of north Scottsdale after spending most of his early days in the New York metro area.
I asked how many baseball games he goes to nowadays and he said, aside from one or two spring training games in Arizona, that if he gets to one Diamondbacks game at Chase Field a season that’s an accomplishment.
“It’s too far and too expensive for me to make that trip all the time. If I have friends or a group that wants to go, that’s one thing. But even then, I wouldn’t buy tickets more than once a season.”
There’s that word ‘expensive’ again.
“What teams oughta do is a lottery.”
What?
“Yeah. Every fan that goes to a game gets one entry. At the end of the season, they have a drawing and someone wins one million dollars. The more you go, the more chances you get.”
He was convinced this would put a bump in attendance without any other measures, like reduced prices or other fan service ideas. Just throw a lottery out there and watch a few thousand more fans come through each season for a chance to win a massive payday.
Looking at the Diamondbacks then, I can try some quick math. My friends know I’m great at doing math problems on Denny’s children’s menus. So the Diamondbacks in 2022 averaged 19,817 fans per game in a pretty nondescript season that finished 74-88. The on-field product wasn’t bad, but the horrid start to the year ruined any chance of playoff-push buzz.
Now here’s the really basic math. The average ticket at Chase Field is $56.00. So that’s $1,109,752 in ticket revenue a game (I know, packages, season tickets, freebies, etc.). That’s $89,889,912 for the season. So if you were going to give $1,000,000 away and not impact the revenue number, you’d have to sell 17,858 more tickets at the average price of $56, or 220 paid fans per home game.
Would a lottery, with everything else remaining the same, draw an extra 20,000 fans a season to cover the jackpot? Maybe? But what about the optics of looking like you have to pay people to come to your product?
I told William I get where he’s coming from, and while it would be nice for a fan to go home with a profit just once, it feels icky to me. Like, we know we overcharge, we know we’re not playing well and we won’t address some of the underlying reasons fans are staying home. Let’s just lure you in with shiny gold and hope you catch baseball fever.
Would you go to more games a season if you had a longshot at winning $1million in a lottery?
With the 2022 Diamondbacks drawing 1,605,177 fans, every game you go to gives you a 0.00006% chance.
