Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
February 19, 2004
That's the Ticket!

The rich get richer.


New York has sold nearly 104,000 tickets worth a total of $4.6 million since Monday, when it acquired the American League MVP from the Texas Rangers. The sales are double the amount for the same period last year, the team said Thursday.


Posted by David Pinto at 10:53 PM | Attendance • | Trades | TrackBack (0)
Comments

104,000 thousand tickets.
Plus those fannies in the seats have to consume food, drink and wear Yankee gear.
How much will they spend on those items?
Six buck beer. Three buck peanuts, soda and ice cream. Four buck dogs. Five buck industrial burgers and pizza. Ten buck pastrami, corn and roat beef.
Plus parking of course. Can't train it in from Jersey, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam or Orange. Or Long Island. And no one wants to subway it in from Queens and Brooklyn.

God, I love baseball!

Posted by: Jim at February 20, 2004 12:44 AM

104,000 thousand tickets.
Plus those fannies in the seats have to consume food, drink and wear Yankee gear.
How much will they spend on those items?
Six buck beer. Three buck peanuts, soda and ice cream. Four buck dogs. Five buck industrial burgers and pizza. Ten buck pastrami, corn and roat beef.
Plus parking of course. Can't train it in from Jersey, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam or Orange. Or Long Island. And no one wants to subway it in from Queens and Brooklyn.

God, I love baseball!

Posted by: Jim at February 20, 2004 12:44 AM

This is the same effect that IRod had on the Tigers this year. People wonder why a team would sign a player for X amount of dollars, and this is why. The team often recoups some, if not all, of the annual salary in ticket & concession revenue. And this, in turn will allow them to sign more (and better) players the next year. It's just the opposite of what teams like the Brewers are doing - dumping players, making your team worse, then having less attendence, making them cut more players the next year.

A team like the Yankees, almost wholly reviled for trading for ARod, now has his salary almost completely covered (with the dropping of Henson & Boone contracts and the trading of Soriano, AND NOW the extra tickets). Pretty smart, eh?

Some teams get it, and some teams don't.

Posted by: sabernar at February 20, 2004 04:20 AM

They didn't have to greatly increase their payroll to get A-Rod but the only way they were able to get them is an option very few other teams have. Most teams aren't so flush with cash that they can burn 17 million on a non-sure thing prospect whose better at football than baseball.

And if a smaller market team had a player putting up close to 40/40 numbers, replacing him with ARod even with Texas footing part of the bill would still increase the payroll by 10+ million and as we saw in Texas, ARod alone doesn't make a winner so the short term bump in tickets/concessions etc... would fade quickly. There have been 8 or 9 $100m dollar contracts, It seems to me that most have turned out to be mistakes and for teams like the Dodgers, Rangers etc... the one good thing about the yankees is that they are willing to take the mistakes off their hands.

Posted by: John Gibson at February 20, 2004 09:19 AM

Let's not get carried away, they sold 104,000 more tickets than they sold at this time last year. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have sold those 104,000 tickets during the year anyways. It just means they got them on the books earlier. Some of these numbers can be deceptive.

Posted by: Erik at February 20, 2004 11:54 AM