With baseball spring training games already getting canceled by the owners’ lockout of players and the few two series of the regular season now officially canceled following yet another breakdown in talks, we’re getting more articles talking about how this is allegedly costing spring-training cities millions of dollars in lost revenue. We’ve been over how this isn’t true before — here’s a good article on how economic studies show that spring training doesn’t actually bring in measurably more revenue to Arizona and Florida, or, if you’d rather hear a comedy club owner in Toronto make a similar point much more evocatively during the 1994 baseball strike, here’s that as well.
But a new, largely crappy article in the San Francisco Chronicle hints at one reason this counterintuitive reality might be the case. Scroll down past all the small-city mayors claiming that canceled spring training weeks cost them $2 million a game, and you land on some fans talking about how their plans have changed now that spring training likely won’t be happening in March:
A’s fan Rich Stein, of Lake Forest, near Irvine, said he had arranged to celebrate his 50th birthday, March 5, with a spring training trip. He rented an Airbnb and friends booked flights from Wisconsin, Oregon and California. It’s too late to cancel, Stein said, so they’re going anyway and will improvise if no baseball is being played.
“One of my buddies was like, ‘Let’s have a Wiffle ball tournament!” Stein said. “I guess now we’re going to play Wiffle ball that Saturday instead of going to a game.”
A’s fan John Tice said he bought plane fares to Arizona months ago, for mid-March, but held off making other plans amid the lockout. … Lori Muhlenbeck and her husband, Mike, embraced the A’s after moving to the Bay Area in 2017. They returned to Wisconsin in 2020 but have made a trip to Arizona each of the past three springs with their two teenagers to watch their team. Muhlenbeck said they had planned to arrive this year on Saturday but have switched to a late March trip “on a hope and a prayer” that the lockout will be resolved.
“We’re going to go anyway,” Muhlenbeck said, “but it won’t be as fun if baseball is not alive and well.”
Previously the leading theory for why spring training doesn’t add much to local coffers has been displacement: Fans coming to town to watch spring training games soak up all the available hotel rooms, meaning visitors who would otherwise go to Florida or Arizona in March because it’s nice in Florida and Arizona in March go somewhere else instead. (Cities also like to count the same fans as multiple visitors even if they’re sticking around to watch multiple games, which, no.)
But is it also possible that some spring-training visits are just converted into non-spring-training visits when fans are forced to adjust plans on the fly? Maybe it’s not so much that spring training doesn’t matter, but just that it only matters if spring training is on the calendar, at which point it’s too late for fans not to spend money in spring training sites?
The best way to check this would be to see what happens when spring training isn’t scheduled at all, and fortunately we have an example of this: 1995, when baseball was in the midst of a strike that had been ongoing since the previous July, and MLB teams held games with scab “replacement players” that had only a fraction of usual attendance. University of Akron professor John Zipp did a study for the Brookings Institution on what happened to taxable sales in Florida spring-training sites that year, and while I can’t find a link to the actual study at the moment, Governing magazine wrote up his findings in 2011:
If spring training had a major financial impact on those communities, they should have suffered tremendously. That didn’t happen, and in fact, their taxable sales increased. Those findings “may indicate that spring training is not the major tourist draw that many claim,” Zipp wrote.
So, we’re back to our original theory: People go to Florida and Arizona for all sorts of reasons in the spring, and spring training games are either soaking up available hotel rooms to the point where it drives away an equal number of non-baseball tourists, or at most it’s such a small drop in the bucket compared to the flood of warm weather seekers that any impact is too small to be measurable. That should be some small comfort to spring training sites as the lockout drags on — and anyway, assuming there’s a season eventually, there will almost be some spring (or summer?) training before it, so baseball tourists will arrive at some point, if that even matters much.
And speaking of the baseball lockout, Marc Normandin and I have a new article over at FAIR on the ways in which the media have portrayed the dispute as one in which both the players and owners are “spoiled” and refusing to come to an agreement, whereas actually this one can be pinned squarely on the owners, who have figured out how to create a two-tier economic system that lowballs salaries for all but the best players and are refusing to even talk about giving that up. It has nothing to do with stadiums, except that it has to do with why baseball isn’t being played in them right now and also who reaps the benefit of baseball spending and the whole minor-league takeover that is also leading to a flood of minor-league stadium subsidy demands, so I rule that it is relevant, you may proceed to read it!
Really important question: how the heck did you find a CBC clip from 1994?
Video store customer’s knee-length jorts were pretty sweet.
I had read an article that cited the CBC story at the time — pretty sure we referenced it in the Field of Schemes book — and then the clip popped up a few years ago and I immediately bookmarked it. The past is truly another country.
I live close to two spring-training stadiums and umpteen bars and restaurants, so I have lots of (purely anecdotal) “evidence” to support your view. People come to Arizona in March for the weather. If baseball is being played: hey, let’s go watch baseball! No baseball? Hey, let’s go play golf! Bike-rental places are doing well also. Sadly, no locals pols are proclaiming the need to subsidize bicycle rental shops, probly because uber-wealthy people don’t own them. Anyway, it’s March, so the town is full, the park behind my place is full, the bars are full, the restos are full. The weather is beautiful and life is good. I wish I could get a tee time.
So, so true. It is this time of year that brings people to Arizona, not spring baseball. We will be fine.
As I soccer fan I view the lockout as meaning NYCFC finally gets their own soccer specific stadium and no long have to share with the Yankees.
And you justify that idea how?
How do I justify it?
It’s a joke, a bit of sarcastic humor.
I thought it was very funny. I can explain for others why. See Yankee stadium, by virtue of its name would seem to imply that the Yankees, with 30+ championships, are the main tenant/owners of the stadium. Even the playing field is shaped for their sport. Now the soccer team, with a less than 10 year existence, and one championship, plays on a field that barely fits on the baseball field. Therefore, implying that now the soccer team is the main inhabitant of the stadium is such a ridiculous statement, that one is moved to laughter. So it is funny.
The owner of the stadium is the New York City Parks Department.
Thank you professor. At least someone on this site has a sense of humor, even for awful humor such as mine
Even in areas that don’t have the “Florida/Arizona” spring training weather benefit, there’s plenty of evidence that surrounding populations (in a CSA/MSA) still travel to the main centre.
Having a major league sports team could well bring in (or at least concentrate) regional spending, but the fact of the matter is that people will go to large centres to shop, by a new car, see a show or do other things anyway. They might go a 8 times instead of 6 if they are sports fans and there is a sports team in situ. Or they might go the same number of times but spend less at other area attractions because they are spending $600 on sports…
The net spending of “fans of opposing teams” in your community is generally offset by the spending of “your fans” in other communities, including the so called tourist taxes.
It’s true that a community with “no” public amenities or attractions struggle to draw visitors. However, I’ve never been convinced that having 28 attractions instead of 27 is worth any additional spending at all.
*buy*…. autoincorrect…
Until the pandemic two years ago, I have come down from Toronto to spend all of March in Land o’ Lakes, Florida. Not once have made the 50 km drive to Dunedin to see the Blue Jays (or any other MLB spring training game). Dunedin Beach is nice.
Not at all ignoring what the Owners have done in this soap opera of sorts. They are clearly pushing the envelope on what can be economically feasible for the game of baseball. The Owners are obviously spoiled because they can simply parade their investments in their respective teams around like they’re toys. Billionaires who never have to worry about economic stability.
However, I don’t think it would be illogical to call the Players out on their own greed and also call them spoiled. They have helped perpetuate this nonsensical economic system where they go on this assumption that the Owners have their backs because of CBA agreements; which, let’s be honest, they don’t.
As a Fan who never sees a penny of what is made by either side, I can’t get myself to have any sympathy for Players who are always begging for more money when a good chunk of them make millions or multi-millions of dollars already. Simply put, way too much money is being thrown around for Fans to keep having any sympathy.
I just don’t think it would be wise to believe that this is only a 2-sided issue between just the Owners and Players. I contend this is a 3-sided issue where the Fans are always the ones getting screwed in the end, having to pay more and more money just to enjoy the games played on the field.
In the big picture everyone and their grandma will be one day priced out of watching even one MLB game, and the league will probably resort to “Robot Fans” and their corporate sponsors to make up the difference at the gate. I’m sure that aligns with their Robot Umpire idea, right?
This is truly a 3-sided issue, and nobody will convince me otherwise.
The players have never pointed a gun at an owner’s heading demanding an outrageous contract. It’s the owners who willingly give, figuring they can make money off it.
In what world do you think players assume owners “have their backs?” They expect an agreement to be honored, but you’re phrasing it as if they’re somehow on the same side (part of your weird framing of this as a three-sided issue where fans are involved as some equal party) when they’re always in conflict over how to divide revenue.
Anyway, as a fan, getting “screwed” is not being able to access a totally frivolous entertainment product at a price you can afford–something that was never guaranteed and over which you have no real ability to control. That is wildly different from demanding compensation for what you produce in an economy where you have to make a living selling labor in a market. The comparison is laughable.
You can choose to consume or not consume baseball but if your desire is make baseball cheaper you’ll default to siding with the owners under a mistaken idea that suppressing player salaries will mean they will pay less for baseball. It won’t and that’s why this three-way framing is nonsense, but that won’t stop it.
I’ll add the other issue with treating consumers as a third side of this conflict is that there absolutely no solidarity between consumers. You may prefer paying $50 for a ticket instead of $100 and you may know others who want to pay $50 too, but the person willing to pay $100 has no obligation to any of you and you have no way to change that.
The biggest reason why this isn’t “three-sided”: Players have zero influence over what owners charge for tickets, concessions, etc. I wrote a whole book chapter on this once for Baseball Prospectus’s “Baseball Between the Numbers” — the upshot is that there is zero correlation between player salaries and ticket prices. Which is what you would expect, as the alternative would be to believe that when salaries are low, owners look around and think, “You know, we *could* raise ticket prices, but that would just be extra profit in our pockets that we wouldn’t have to spend on players, what do we need with that?”
Link here should get you to most of the chapter:
https://books.google.com/books?id=VsmnfVUKJskC&pg=PA226&lpg=PA226&dq=baseball+behind+the+numbers+demause&source=bl&ots=t91N2freY4&sig=ACfU3U08ryX1Vh5YHTXS9rlUZdMKW3-7Fw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwir0dmzwar2AhXhRd8KHTe5DzgQ6AF6BAguEAM#v=onepage&q=ask%20baseball%20fans%20what%20peeves&f=false
Anyway, what we really have here is two separate two-sided battles: Owners and fans over how much to pay to watch games, and owners and players over how much to pay athletes to play those games. The former affects the latter, because it determines how much money there is in the overall pie to be fought over at CBA time, but there is no indication that the latter influences the former. At all.
I knew my comment was going to ruffle up some feathers the moment I posted it. You guys can go ahead and call me nuts for what I believe, but we have years worth of evidence that point towards a completely broken sport (entertainment option…) that intentionally won’t listen to consumers they supposedly care about.
Respectfully I say this, Neil; I don’t need a lecture to understand what’s really at play here.
If fans want to pay hundreds and thousands of dollars just to see an entire season worth of games, that is their economic problem they made for themselves.
Players don’t make matters better by complaining on their own island about how many millions of dollars they should be paid, when in reality they need to put a sock in it and realize that the rest of us in America are hurting. It isn’t that hard to understand.
The Owners on their end have the gall to tell me as a fan that I pay half a mortgage just to be a fan of an MLB team. On top of that, they destroy Minor League and Independent League baseball just so they can feel more secure about their investments.
In closing, and this is probably the last Field of Schemes post I will make in a while, Neil, I believe all of us have been (and probably still are) blinded by how damaging all this talk about infinite amounts of money truly is. I stand by what I say; Fans are getting priced out of the ballpark left and right, and if you don’t think that’s a problem on any level, then I say that’s laughable and you are clearly not doing your homework. The supposed feeling was that without Fans, both the Owners and Players would suffer.
MLB and the MLBPA are clearly telling us Fans that our opinions do not matter. They only care about money. That is their sword, and if they fall on it, they’ve earned it. None of them get sympathy from me whatsoever.
Funny how a league like MLB steps in and appoints themselves to govern a game they never actually invented in the 1800s, and then you see the fruits of their labor as if we should respect them…
3-sided issue. The End.
Fans are definitely getting priced out of the ballpark left and right, and I definitely think that’s a problem.
However, this would be, and has been, a problem in years where player salaries are going up, and in years where player salaries are going down. So the players, while they certainly can agitate for a cut of the ticket boodle, don’t have any say in how prices are set.
Here’s an article I wrote so long ago about the reasons why players are paid so much that the players in question included Sterling Hitchcock and David Bell. It’s all still true, especially the bit about Ronald Reagan:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081013074027/http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0249/demause.php
Hi Steven;
I’m hoping you don’t leave the forum… it’s always nice to have alternate views to ponder. We may heartily agree or disagree, but it’s the divergence of views that is important.
I’m not sure anyone disagrees that fans are getting screwed/ripped off?
Is MLB doing this any worse than the telecom companies? Or banks or insurance companies?
We are certainly not “partners” in their businesses now. Nor were we really ever.
We are resources to exploit (anyone who has spent any time on the alleged customer service lines/chats with any telecom or airline must surely realize that they aren’t even important enough for the company to have a real person talk to them). One of the fundamental failings of the modern business world (and capitalism generally) is that no-one, literally, is offering an alternative to this shameless exploitation of consumers. If they did, they would have absolutely ALL the business in their sector. Yet no-one does it.
This is where MLB is too. They aren’t building a better mousetrap, they are using cartel like powers to try to force consumers to overpay for the same shitty, ineffective mousetrap they’ve always sold… and to sell it on a contract that requires you to pay monthly whether you have mice or not.
The only thing we can do with MLB that we can’t do with other businesses (banks, insurance, telecoms, global agribusiness) is tell them to take their pathetic product and shove it.
As I point out below, if we don’t tell them that, then we are telling them that how their are treating us is just fine. I think we shouldn’t do that anymore, but that’s just me.
Considering the Akron University nickname, it is appropriate that they have a Professor Zipp.
As fans all we can do is vote with our feet: Stop buying tickets and merch, and cancel RSN subscriptions.
It would mean going back to watching the game of the week (which Fox doesn’t really even do anymore… game of the ‘some’ weeks, maybe?) alone as your baseball fix – at least as far as MLB goes.
We aren’t entitled to any access to the games, nor are we obligated to support MLB’s business (*except as taxpayers in cities and counties where hundreds of millions have been guaranteed in stadium subsidies).
If enough of us were willing to not watch, the owners and players could not be having this fight over ‘our’ money.
The media is correct in that case. The minimum salary being offered is 700k a year plus benefits. That is solidly in the top 1 percent before even any investment income.