Welcome to the State of Baseball, 2023
What's to come
Background: Before the start of the 2022 season, when the owners’ lockout had just temporarily canceled Spring Training and regular season games, the news out of the baseball world became predictable. The owners wouldn’t budge on this issue and the players dug in on that issue. It was the same nonsense day after day, week after week. Ultimately, every issue was rooted in money and how to squeeze every last penny out of the other side.
It was an ugly reminder that the top priority in professional sports is making money. So while I sat around and watched the league take a blowtorch to the Spring Training calendar, I wondered. Major League Baseball (and this goes for every league) runs on a three-way contract. The owners operate the business, the players are the product, and the fans are the customer.
Unlike the competition of, say, insurance companies or light beers or smartphones, a sports fan is a lifelong customer. More than any other product, there is a deep emotional attachment that starts before a kid even takes swings in T-ball. Families and friends bond as fans of their team. Civic pride is at its peak when a championship-caliber team is playing.
Taco Bell removing the 7-Layer-Burrito generated a lot of nationwide angst over the beloved late-night snack. But that’s nothing compared to the heartbreak felt by young Atlanta Braves fans watching franchise icon Freddie Freeman sign with the Los Angeles Dodgers just months after winning a World Series.
My point here is that fans are as much a piece of this $10.8 billion dollar business as the players and owners. Fans provide the ticket revenue, the merchandise sales, and the eyeballs that drive the television ad buys that line everyone’s pocket books.
Research:
I have plenty of theories. I’m sure you the reader do, too. I know teams all have ideas, with their market research and focus groups and other methods designed to find ways to extract a few extra dollars out of us.
Using the FanCostIndex from Team Market Report, the average cost for a package that includes four tickets, parking, two beers, four non-alcoholic drinks, four hot dogs and two adult, adjustable hats in 2022 was $256.41. I’m sure you could skip the hats and maybe one of the cokes if that helps. Ten years ago, that number was $201.84, an increase of 27%. In 2002, when Albert Pujols was the reigning NL Rookie of the Year, that number was $137.70. The hats may have been of poorer quality, but the beers were just as cold and summer sun just as hot, but over 20 years the index has jumped 86%. The Real Median Household Income in the US has increased just 10% over that span. Inflation was 68% over those twenty years.
So Major League Baseball is asking for a greater piece of our pie while arguably providing less than ever before. Less action, less hits, less loyalty. Higher ticket prices, more “alternate” jerseys to buy, skyrocketing parking fees to leave your car on a piece of pavement for three hours…
And they can get away with it. Total attendance league-wide has remained in the range of 64 to 74-million since 2002, about a 28-30,000 average per game.
Proposal: I want to look at the state of baseball in 2023. I want to talk to people inside the sport, covering the sport, and most importantly watching the sport. I want to see what a baseball fan in 2023 is like. Do they go to games? Do they follow their team passionately? Is there interest in baseball increasing? Decreasing? What’s driving their fandom? What’s pushing them to their breaking point? Are they non-fans, casual or hardcore? And why?
I could spit out all of my guesses, and that would be just one person’s opinion. But this year I want to go for a total immersion strategy and get in the shoes of every one that is remotely connected to baseball. A baseball fan in Seattle might root for a different team than a fan from Atlanta, but they are baseball fans. And with the country today divided in so many ways, politically, demographically, religiously, etc, having any kind of common thread among Americans is something that should be explored.
Substack Goal: This page will be the home for all of that research. I’m thinking until Opening Day, three or four posts a week and then once games start we get waist deep. So in the first few days, I’ll throw out my story, some of my guesses and other content. And as I get to more games, I’ll be posting everything I discover from conversations with fans nationwide while I make my way toward the goal of getting to 200 baseball games this season.
On top of the content and photography, there may be a podcast coming so you can hear these views in people’s own words.
And the extra bonus for subscribers: home run picks! I’ll post about that in a bit but this could be a profitable adventure for you.
See you at the park!
