Yeah, there’s no way the Bruins management changed the tread depth (technical seating terminology for the horizontal distance from one row to the next) when replacing seats. So if they didn’t change the seat width either, then the problem must be that the seats themselves take up more room, which points to the padding…
The Mets, for one, do that by offering tons of discount offers throughout the season — 40% off to celebrate Pete Alonso’s 40th homer, four tickets for $48 for Jacob deGrom, whatever. The problem is twofold: 1) It makes it all too easy for certain fans (i.e., me) to hold off on ever buying tickets at full price because…
Baseball has always been slow-moving, so that doesn’t really explain why attendance is suddenly falling now. Or why it increased in the ’00s when games were getting longer and longer.
Cutting the number of games to boost per-game attendance only works if you can cut costs as a result, though. Somehow I doubt the players’ union would take kindly to “Hey, great idea! How about we only play games June through August and pay you players half as much and keep all the profits from increased ticket…
Friends don’t let friends buy stadium food. You can’t bring in your own beer (at least, not without some trickery), but you absolutely can bring in your own hot dogs, at least at Yankees and Mets games.
High salaries do *not* drive up ticket prices, concessions, etc. I wrote a whole book chapter on that once:
Not allowing fans to bring their own water bottles should be against the Geneva Convention. (And has been a huge controversy in some places — didn’t the Pirates back down on a no-outside-water policy right after PNC Park opened?)
We could go back to not allowing gloves. That would make fielding plays a lot more exciting.
But but but nobody will go to Globe Life Park because it doesn’t have air conditioning! The Rangers owners wouldn’t lie to me about a thing like that!
They could always de-link scoring from game time by making games seven innings long.
The Mets were having regular $5-a-ticket sales back before they got into (the fringes of) the wild card race; even after their big winning streak, they did a 40% off sale to celebrate Pete Alonso hitting his 40th homer. As Noll said to me, but it didn’t make it into the piece, MLB marketing is starting to become more…
The only thing keeping me going to baseball games on a regular basis is that they still allow outside food. (The Mets’ official policy, as memorably told me by a PR rep years ago, is “You can bring in a turkey sandwich, but you can’t bring in a whole turkey.”) There’s no way I could afford to go more than once in a…
Most stadiums these days are owned by the public and leased to the team owners — it’s the quickest way to get around paying property taxes.
DC spent $94 million on land and infrastructure for the Verizon Center, according to Judith Grant Long’s figures. It’s not a terrible deal overall, but it’s not better than Boston, Denver, etc.
I continue to be amazed that Kraft built Gillette Stadium mostly himself even after being offered wheelbarrows of money by Hartford. Though he did get the NFL G-3 stadium fund out of it, so I guess he used the leverage for something.
Same is true in Denver, San Diego, Cleveland, etc. Sports team owners are great at identifying areas already prepped for development, but that doesn’t mean that they had much to do with causing it, any more than Thai restaurants cause neighborhood incomes to go up.
The new St. Louis MLS deal is way more promising than the old one, but there are still too many questions about the land and property-tax subsidies for me to give it the seal of nonsuckitude. Definitely props to St. Louis voters for telling the former ownership group to fuck off with their sales-tax subsidy demands,…
Los Angeles gets credit for saying for 20 years, “Oh, right, the NFL. I suppose if you want to build a stadium and give us a team we’ll accept that.”
It also has the benefit of California’s easily accessible citizen referendum rules. Most of the best sports venue deals in the country have been in California, and that’s…
A lot depends on the sport. MLB depends so heavily on local TV revenue and has done such a good job of filling all the best markets (now that D.C. is back) that any move threats there are pretty much inherently bogus. In the NFL, you could play in Ouagadougou and still get a cut of those tasty national TV checks,…