Brewers Reportedly Willing To Consider Relocation

Baseballislife:

How was the percentage defined?

If you claim it was percentage of attendance, I’m doubtful.

So many tickets are sold and resold to non-local residents, at best they could seek who the team identified the original ticket as being sold to which has no correlation to who attends the games.

3% of 40,000 is 1200 fans. At 2% you’re talking 800. For a 20,000 attendance night, that 2% is 400 people.

I find it inconceivable to expect, just from attending ball games, that in a sellout crowd only 800 or less fans are from out of state, at least so many games and venues I’ve been to.

Now, looking at it from another perspective, does a chamber of commerce calculate total tourism revenue per year, and, compare it to what the baseball team brings in? Well, again, it doesn’t add up as the person who hits the ballpark, many rent hotel rooms, buy gasoline and snacks, hit a resturaunt or bar, all things that add revenue. It’s not just the cost of the ticket and stadium food.

As with most things, the truth is somewhere in between. Many ‘independent’ studies are seeking to disprove the ‘pro-stadium’ studies. Dig deep enough on the funding, who the staffers are so on so forth. There’s always an agenda.

At the end of the day, I’m sure if you looked at many municipalities, common sense says they come ahead. Who wants to go visit Baltimore for…. Baltimore? Remove the sports teams, and, a LOT less people go there or spend money. You could say the same for dozens of other sports cities.

Big cities live, and die, based on discretionary spending these days. Gone are the days where everyone had factories and made durable goods, now it’s services based. They aren’t raising crops. They aren’t making appliances. It’s a services based economy.

And the more times a single dollar changes hands, the more tax revenue it generates.

Stymeedone-

I think I more or less understand the argument baseballislife is trying to make: tourism dollars are a zero sum game within a defined economic radius. He asserts that if you have x number of people they will always spend y number of dollars, and, you can’t increase that bucket of y dollars budgeted for entertainment/tourism, only change where they get used.

I tend to differ, I think what people spend their money on, and where, can be more fluid. I may spend less money to an online retailer who is in the form of a large entity, say, an Amazon or Summit Racing, neither of which have a local presence or invest locally. If a ball club is around, I will reallocate my budget, blowing less money on race car parts or bullets going shooting, and, instead pump money into local teams.

That is the fallacy – economists assume a household makes budgets like the government with allocation and always spend the same on each category regardless of variation on offerings. The truth is, someone may spend more money on disposable goods that don’t support the local economy instead of entertainment options which would, or vice versa, depending on what is in the area.

When I pay Amazon, or Summit, that money is gone from this economic zone and doesnt return. When I pay a team, or a gas station, or a resturaunt, it pays a local worker, local distributors, etc etc who then each spends some portion of that money to local businesses, keeping money in circulation locally. This also gives a basis to support the existence of locally owned, operated, located, and/or run businesses.

The fact that the studies rely upon initial ticket sales, which then undergo massive changes of ownership via stubhub and its ilk, are enough to cause a high enough degree of error in the tourism calculations as to make the studies fatally flawed and near worthless in most aspects.

Baseballislife-

That is an outdated assumption and data set.

1) I’m curious about the socioeconomic groups that retained an accounting firm regarding their finances. A very VERY low percentage of households do this, except for taxes where a majority still file themselves, which, do not delve into tracking where your average household spends its non-housing budget.

2) with the meteoric rise of online shopping, the amount of household spending that goes to its local merchants is at an all-time low here in the US – just look at the revenue statements for Amazon and other online retailers, and, the corresponding vacancies in commercial retail space like shopping malls. Look further at the bankruptcies of retail chains, and, those fighting to borderline stay afloat.

People aren’t shopping local like they used to, and a large percentage of discretionary spending flows through internet commerce which is why there has been a push by local entities to tax e-commerce, and, the IRS to gain access to reporting on electronic payments (PayPal, etc)

Actually, you would be surprised.

Amazon bought whole foods to increase its last-mile delivery footprint for food products.

There are dozens of large scale online meal delivery services that go far beyond the Omaha steaks types of old, and now include things like blue apron, healthy roots, and multitudes more. The share of households who no longer go to a local grocery store to shop is steadily increasing.

People order pet foods and products online from Amazon, chewy, and others.

Walmart.com, target.com, costco and sams club, and other online marketplaces do not ship most products from local stores, but rather out of centralized distribution .

The degree to which people participate in those programs shifts among location and demographics, both age and income.

But, the basic points remain –

1) studies that rely on initial ticket purchasers addresses have no correlation to predicting the final attendee/user of said tickets after the resale market takes hold. Just look at the numbers of tickets listed for sale, and sold, on stubhub and similar sites.

2) people can and will shift spending categories for their disposable funds based upon opportunities. Removing one opportunity doesn’t mean they spend on an alternative in the same category for discretionary items, which is to say, entertainment funds can go to other luxury or hobby expenses, switch to savings, or possibly switch to other entertainment spending.

I spent far far more on baseball games when I lived 30 minutes from the stadium, when I kept season tickets to the braves in addition to doing roughly 21 fenway games a season.

Since bloom, I stopped attending fenway games in person. After moving almost 5 hours away from truist ballpark I no longer kept my season tickets.

None of that expenditure has been shifted to other dining or live entertainment. All of it has been shifted to buying NOS auto parts online from all over the country to store for future projects.

Why? No local entertainment options exist that have similar enticement. That’s why it’s a fallacy to expect people to keep spending the same money they would on live professional sports should the access disappear. People will spend on what is in their greatest interest, for their greatest enjoyment, when it is discretionary spending.