If you build it.....maybe they won't come

[marmar]

from Newsday:



Yankees, Mets misread what market will bear
Wallace Matthews

April 20, 2009


Upon further review, maybe the Yankees and Mets should have built them smaller.

Their ballparks, I mean. One week into their new eras, and neither team seems able to fill the ones they have, despite reams of free publicity in newspapers and endless gratuitous hype on their own broadcasts.

Last year, when both teams finally owned up to the fact that there would be a total of 20,000 fewer seats between the two parks, it appeared New York would be grossly underserved. Now it appears the opposite is true, and the teams have no one to blame but themselves.

Ninety miles down the turnpike, they are turning fans away at Citizens Bank Park, and in New York, at least 10,000 seats go unoccupied every game. There can be only one explanation: The tickets are too damned expensive. And something must be done about it soon.

Ken Davidoff's baseball blog Sunday, the Yankees hosted the Indians and the Mets hosted the Brewers. Neither place came within 5,000 seats of being sold out. Most teams would be overjoyed playing to 85-percent capacity in April, but these are not most teams and this is not any other city.

Both ballparks were built on many of the same principles that are destroying our economy. Both teams grotesquely, and artificially, inflated the value of their product, and did their best to create a false sense of demand by reducing capacity and trying to bully longtime fans into paying absurd new prices or risk being shut out. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.newsday.com/sports/baseball/ny-spwally2012673949apr19,0,3598819.column

[BlooInBloo]

1. (shrug) Oh well.

[tularetom]

2. Serves the greedy bastards right

HA HA!

It's fucking obscene the way these fuckers push the stupid public and politicians around. I don't blame the players for trying to get in on the action but the whole fuckin mess is out of hand.

You could eat for a week on what it costs to take your family to one of these dumbass games.

[TreasonousBastard]

3. And just who paid for those new ballparks?

[imdjh]

4. 20 years from now baseball will be shuffleboard n/t

[provis99]

5. good riddance to major league baseball

I'd rather stick with the double A Memphis Chicks. In minor league ball you can see a player who actually plays for love of the game, rather than see some millionaire steroid-injector whine about his contract in major league baseball.

[DCKit]

6. OMFG. You didn't say how bad it really is....

http://www.newsday.com/sports/baseball/ny-spwally2012673949apr19,0,3598819.column

"Clearly, the great experiment went awry. New York will not go for $2,500 tickets to a ballgame, or $695 tickets, or even, judging by this weekend, $125 tickets."

Nice park though.

[Elwood P Dowd]

7. The 1933 NY Yankees averaged only 9,700 fans per game,

yet they led the league in attendance. It's only going to get worse.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/NYY/1933.shtml