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!