These new sports palaces — almost always bankrolled with taxpayer subsidies of one sort or another — have replaced stadiums that still had years of useful life ahead. But the older facilities served a different America. They lacked what owners now crave: luxury accommodations for America’s affluent. Ballparks that can’t be reconfigured to prominently position luxury seating have simply become obsolete.
Easily affordable seats, in the meantime, have essentially disappeared. Analysts at the Team Marketing Report started tracking a “Fan Cost Index” in the 1990s. These analysts have been calculating how much a typical family of four spends for a day or a night out at the ballpark, including everything from average-price tickets and souvenir caps to hot dogs and parking. By 2002, families were paying an average $145 to watch a Major League Baseball game in person. The latest tally: an average $256.
Numbers like these are changing the fan experience. Fans, acting in emotional self-defense, have become consumers. They no longer see sports through the same emotional lens.
“Instead of hoping that your team wins, you begin to demand it,” as sportscaster Bob Costas has noted. “It’s like you bought a car and if it doesn’t work, you want to know why. When a team doesn’t win, instead of disappointment or heartbreak, you now have anger and resentment.”
Meanwhile, at the other end of the pro sports spectrum, a new ownership class now dominates. Team owners a half century ago certainly rated as rich, but not nearly as rich as today’s billionaire owners. These billionaires see themselves as superstars and credit their business success to their personal superstar status. Success in sports, they assume, must work the same way. Get your team some superstars!
But billionaires can’t simply buy success on the ballfield. Ballclubs owe their success, year in and year out, much more to team camaraderie than individual performance, as Matt Bloom, a management expert at the University of Notre Dame, has documented. Bloom subjected nine years’ worth of baseball salary and performance data to close analysis. His key finding?
“The bigger the pay difference between a team’s stars and scrubs,” as the Wall Street Journal summed up Bloom’s findings, “the worse its record.”
“Money makes those who pay it resentful and impatient and makes those who receive it feel guilty or inadequate,” the now retired ace sportswriter Thomas Boswell once lamented.
“Maybe, someday,” Boswell went on to muse, “baseball will attract a core of owners with a sense of balance in their expectations.”
Do we have an alternative to simply yearning for a better class of super-rich owners? We sure do. Imagine how good sports could be if we had a society with no super rich at all.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.
Sam Pizzigati | Radio Free (2022-08-09T05:50:09+00:00) Baseball Immortality Meets Ungodly Inequality. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/09/baseball-immortality-meets-ungodly-inequality/
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