Baseball Goes Uptown
A baseball crowd "is a beer-drinking and cheesecake stands at Oriole Park at crowd, not a mixed-drink crowd," Bill Veeck, Camden Yards in Baltimore, notes Dortch, the late owner of the Chicago White Sox, senior editor of American Demographics. once observed. He never saw the cappuccino Baseball today, she argues, is a sport for the affluent and in danger of becoming the ex-national pastime.
The 1994–95 strike by (wealthy) players against (wealthy) owners seems to have permanently turned off a lot of fans, not least working-class ones. Only 14 percent of adults in blue-collar and lower-paid white-collar jobs went to the ballparks last year, a decline of about four percentage points since 1993. Among physicians, lawyers, and other professionals, in contrast, attendance remained the same: 21 percent.
It’s not just the strike that’s responsible. The average cost of a day at a major league ballpark for a family of four last year totaled $97.25. (That bought four average-priced tickets, two small draft beers, two small soft drinks, four hot dogs, two game programs, two souvenir caps, and one parking space).
In smaller markets, such as Cincinnati, the tab can be much smaller. Teams such as the Reds depend heavily on ticket and concession sales and so remain "keenly aware of the need to keep baseball affordable," Dortch observes. But in the biggest markets, such as New York and Los Angeles, revenue from TV broadcasts matters most. Many owners, she says, see television executives as the most important "fans," not the bleacher bums. This view may prove very shortsighted. The percentage of adults who watch baseball on TV dropped to 22 percent last year, down sharply from 31 percent in 1993.
__"The Future of Baseball" by Shannon Dortch, in American Demographics (Apr. 1996), 127 W. State St., Ithaca, N.Y. 14850.__
This article originally appeared in print