Attendance Update and the Angels’ Latest PR Mess
Major League Baseball might be incredibly healthy in terms of attendance, television ratings, and finances, but the league has a perception problem that will not go away anytime soon. Baseball’s biggest challenge is, and always likely will be, creating new fans. This is not a challenge unique to baseball or sports in general. All sports continue efforts to draw in new fans just like Coke and Pepsi use marketing campaigns to lure in a new generation of soda drinkers. Rob Manfred has made one of his goals to increase childhood participation in baseball as he believes that children who play baseball turn into baseball fans as adults, continuing the generational chain that has allowed baseball to thrive for more than a century.
While getting more youths to participate in baseball is hardly the only initiative MLB will undertake to grow the sport, getting new fans to attend games is very important for baseball’s future. The Angels’ most recent public-relations mistake, discouraging fans from lower socioeconomic levels from attending because they do not spend as much as other fans once they get to games, is a shortsighted strategy that could hurt baseball in the long run.
In his story for the OC Register, Pedro Moura discussed the Angels’ declining attendance with Robert Alvarado, a Vice President with the team. Alvarado dismissed targeting fans looking to pay for lower-priced seats because they do not make as many purchases once they are inside the stadium. This somewhat callous disregard for “discount buyers,” as Alvarado calls them, might work for short-term revenue, but the team has seen one of the bigger drops in attendance in MLB and the plan is a questionable one long-term.
Since we looked at attendance last month, there have not been too many big changes at the top or bottom of attendance rankings. The Los Angeles Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, and New York Yankees are still the highest-drawing teams, and the Cleveland Indians, rebounding on the field and in attendance, passed the Tampa Bay Rays in seasonal attendance over the past month. The Angels do boast decent numbers compared to all teams. (All attendance numbers below from Baseball Reference.)
Looking at the change since last season, the Kansas City Royals still lead the way, but the Angels have taken quite a tumble.
Overall, attendance is still up around 100,000 fans compared to last season at this point. The Braves were the biggest decliner after April, but the Rangers and their disappointing season have overtaken them. Also near the bottom are the Angels, despite coming off a good season in 2014 and boasting the best player in baseball. The numbers actually look worse for the Angels when comparing April attendance to the season-to-date numbers.
Pittsburgh’s attendance has increased as they look to compete for another playoff berth, and the Chicago Cubs will benefit from an increase in capacity as the bleachers slowly re-open. Colorado has seen a precipitous fall, but right there with the Tampa Bay Rays are the Los Angeles Angels. After averaging more than 39,000 fans in 2014, the Angels were bringing in average of close to 36,000 one month ago. Another month has passed, and the Angels’ attendance has fallen again, down to below 34,000, a drop of nearly 5,000 fans compared to where they were at this point last season. The Angels, per Moura’s piece, do not appear overly concerned with the drop in fans given the quotes from team executive Alvarado, as revenue has remained high by focusing on those patrons who spend more at the ballpark.
“We’re not panicked,” he said. “We’re taking a different strategy this year. We’re getting a higher yield per ticket, selling less tickets, making a little bit more money than we did last year.
…
“We may not be reaching as many of the people on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, but those people, they may enjoy the game, but they pay less, and we’re not seeing the conversion on the per-caps,” Alvarado said. “In doing so, the ticket price that we’re offering those people, it’s not like I can segregate them, because I’m offering it up to the public, and I’m basically downselling everybody else in order to accommodate them.”
As Moura notes in his piece, there are still plenty of cheap seats available to Angels games. A quick search on the team’s website shows part of their strategy as the site immediately attempts to segregate ticket buyers by separating general tickets from “Diamond Club” tickets as seen in the screenshot below.
That same search also revealed many cheap tickets, some as low as five dollars, for an upcoming Saturday night game. The Angels have not priced out fans from lower socioeconomic classes from entering the game, but they apparently do want their well-off fans to know that the club is marketing to the rich and trying to prevent their less well-off fans from intermingling.
The public-relations issue appears to be that the Angels are preventing fans who can only afford tickets under $20 from attending games, but this is not supported by the club’s ticket pricing. The issue is that the Angels are only targeting fans who spend a lot of money at the ballpark and discourage those who might be able to afford more in the future. Baseball fandom is most likely to be born from ages 8-12, and one of the greatest ways to get someone to become a fan is to get them to the ballpark. Unless childhood has undergone radical changes in the last few decades, children generally do not get to decide when they go to baseball games. Discouraging those parents from taking children to the game hurts potential future fans and prevents them from gaining a foothold in the game.
Many successful businesses cater to their most wealthy customers, but a sport like baseball, which needs widespread support and needs to get fans while they are young, should be doing all it can to help create fans, regardless of personal wealth. Embracing those fans who might not be able to spend in great numbers at the ballpark could pay off. Colleges and Universities attempt to get recent graduates to give $50-$100 in the hopes that establishing a trend and a relationship might pay off down the line with bigger donations. Most sports franchises have mini-season ticket packages, some from five games to half a season with hopes that those packages grow into full-season tickets. Encouraging potential future fans should be paramount in any team’s effort to grow future revenues.
The Angels did not make themselves look like a sensitive or caring organization with the way they handled Josh Hamilton’s addiction, and their current marketing strategy further supports the notion that the Angels are insensitive and out of touch. Given that ticket prices to Angels games are very cheap, this blunder is a public-relations problem that shows a poor attitude to all Angels fans. Major League Baseball is thriving, but like any business, it needs to generate new customers to succeed, and the Angels trouble selling tickets is problematic even if their revenues stay the same.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
So what else do you suggest the Angels do besides offer $5 tickets to Saturday night games?
I would say they should tell team executives to shut their mouths.
So somebody tells the truth and it’s a PR nightmare. This is how we get interviews were people speak a bunch of words and say nothing, because they’re too afraid to offend anyone. Alvarado said they are making more money with fewer people there.
Of course they should try and sell out every night and grow the fan base, I’m sure everyone in the organization would love that. But it’s not like they pulled the plug on the cheap tickets. They’re still on sale! This is pure class envy claptrap.
Don’t forget to tie this into what Manfred is doing to bring baseball back to inner city youths, the same youths who would probably fall under the low-ROI portion of the fan base. MLB and, presumably, the other teams 29 teams continue to reach out to those youths, the Angels are basically doing the opposite. Hence the PR problem. The fact that they haven’t raised ticket prices doesn’t matter if they do nothing to market them to the people who are most likely to buy them.
“Somebody tells the truth and its a PR nightmare.” — welcome to 21t century America.
I’m sure you would have the same reaction if the quotes were from Hal Steinbrenner…
Excellent comments from the angles from Angeles Anaheimers
No, some dippy exec spouts classist bullshit as gospel truth and there the PR nightmare begins.
When did “telling the truth” become a good thing? There’s a reason the human mind has a safety valve to prevent us from blurting everything that comes to our mind. It’s why I don’t tell a co-worker I dislike that I believe he’s an a-hole, or a good looking woman I want to squeeze her boobs.
By the same token, even if team executives don’t care regular customers and only care about short term luxury seat sales, most have the tact to not say it.
2 areas where critical thinking might help Colonel Oblivious:
1. It is certainly possible that the Angels are just saying this strategy results in “making more money” when they don’t have the tools to analyze it and therefore are just making this up….
2. It is also certainly possible that the Angels are making a short-term decision that meaningfully impairs the long-term value of the business and therefore “making more money” now likely leads to “losing more money” in the future
Lastly, I’d suggest that Colonel Oblivious look to other hospitality industries with fixed capacities (e.g., hotels, cruise lines, airlines, etc.) who have almost uniformly decided that utilization trumps pricing and that the equation of more price and less people rarely works in the short-term.
Oh…. and I don’t know under which privileged, ignorant Tea Party rock you call home, but most Americans view the increasing disparity in incomes and wealth in the US not as “class envy claptrap” but as a structural problem.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. If you have a business with expensive fixed assets, you maximize your profit by utilizing the sh!t out of them – every unit of unused capacity is an opportunity cost.
Not that I particularly care whether billionaire sports owners maximize their profits. But I can’t stop myself from calling out stupid business logic when I see it.
This is really well put. It’s one thing to think the trend of owners trying to make the sport into/sell it as a premium product is a reprehensible thing because of its horrible class politics (and I agree with you totally about that) but even in strictly capitalist-business-planning and marketing terms it’s a horrible and self-destructive idea in the long term.
The problem is that baseball — as a sport and as an industry — needs broad mass appeal to prosper, but broad mass appeal doesn’t (necessarily) work in each individual owner’s short-term profit-maximizing interest. The sport needs kids, and kids tend to be significantly poorer than adults; the sport needs non-white fans, and ditto. Your utilization argument is a good one, but it’s still possible that you have to sell someone like Moreno on selling some non-optimally-expensive tickets in order not to cut off your long-term nose to spite your short-term face.
“most Americans” — I assume you live either on the left or right coast and only listen to the insulated libtard culture prevailing there. If you are in a lower income bracket, this is the greatest place on earth from which to work yourself out of it. stop whining about someone having more than you and get out there and do something about improving your own life.
I know it’s “kevinthecomic” and not “kevinthedemographer” (though he seems about as good at each), but since this is FanGraphs and data is supposed to matter more here than knee-jerk attachment to predecided talking points and emotional appeals, someone with a less comical worldview might be interested in seeing some data.
http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobility/
In fact, income mobility is vastly inferior in the US to much of Western Europe, Canada, and Australia. The Scandinavian social democracies are in fact far better places to “work yourself out of” poverty than the U.S. is, precisely because they work so hard as societies to mitigate poverty’s effects on people.
C’mon Roger. Presenting something from epi.org as fact? Really? It’s a left-wing think tank with a clear liberal agenda. Give me a break.
Well, you definitely sound like a person worth taking seriously.
Okay, I’ll bite:
“A new study finds that contrary to widespread belief, it’s no harder to climb the economic ladder in the United States today than it was 20 years ago.
But the study did find that moving up that ladder is still a lot more difficult in the U.S. than in other developed countries.”
Taken from:
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/23/265356290/study-upward-mobility-no-tougher-in-u-s-than-two-decades-ago
Also:
http://www.businessinsider.com/inequality-and-mobility-in-the-united-states-2013-7
The US sucks balls when it comes to income mobility. Kevinthecomic’s claim is ridiculous.
If he won’t acknowledge epi.org, then kevinthecomic is unlikely to accept npr.org and/or businessinsider.com as legitimate sources either.
Suffice to say that market segmentation is a fairly well established and relatively uncontroversial business strategy; and anyone who would reduce an honest discussion of a real-life instance of it to “class envy claptrap” is clearly promoting an unrelated ideological agenda.
Under my TeaParty Rock I correctly view decreased mobility into the middle class as a predictable outcome of mindless liberal social engineering, but that’s hardly relevant to the article.
Basically, it looks like the Angels are doing things to allow families on a budget to see games ($5 Saturdays!), but this executive seems to think they aren’t. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, but my guess is this executive is just mindlessly shooting off his mouth. I’m all for a business that wants to only target the wealthy if they think that will work for them, but then they should not expect to be given publicly financed facilities.
Are they really discouraging lower-income people from attending games, or are they just focusing their marketing dollar on high-ROI customers? I agree that it might very well be a short-sighted strategy, but I don’t really see any moral issue with it.
That sort of investment strategy isn’t necessarily morally problematic, but being so open about devaluing less-well-off customers, because, hey, they can’t bring us bags of money anyway, so why bother even putting on the face of caring for them? is pretty callous, and it is, as Craig states, a PR nightmare at the very least.
I’m not so sure, and tend to agree with SS above. I find this coverage a bit Gawker-esque tbh. This does highlight an interesting disconnect between MLB at the macro level, which is interested in increasing share, versus running an individual team, which is focused on increasing attendance profitably.
PR nightmare? Thanks for the laugh. The only people that would call this a nightmare would be drama queens attempting to manufacture a crisis when none exists.
The strategy is fine. The problem is publicly stating you don’t care about some (probably large) section of your market, that you don’t care whether or not they come (or even that you prefer someone else came instead). Most people assume the folks who operate businesses, in general, see customers for their money first, but we can generally suspend disbelief until the businesses outwardly states it.
Basically, this is a PR problem not because they are marketing to wealthier people, but because they have publicly dismissed the rest of their fanbase. People don’t like to be dismissed.
PR Nightmare — people who spend their lives looking for reasons to be offended are rarely disappointed.
Even if your statement is accepted as true offended people spend their dollar elsewhere, which is bad for business.
It’s fine to do, but it’s dumb to admit, much less announce.
What in the hell is the problem with the Rays fanbase? This tells me that they just don’t have one. Shame, because it looks like they have a pretty good team.
Montréal is calling…
Tampa isn’t much of a city. I’m surprised it’s not the smallest market in MLB.
I take it you haven’t been to Milwaukee?
I’ve been to both and have lived in WI my whole life. What Milwaukee has that Tampa doesn’t is a culture surrounding sports. In WI, people will still go to games just to hang out. Also, they show up 3 hours early to drink beer and grill out in the parking lot with their friends. If you watch a Friday game, you’ll hear the buzz of people 30,000 people who’ve turned the ballpark into a pub.
Miles – I can’t confirm your impression of WI, although it sounds correct. What I can confirm is that I didn’t see a single person in the parking lot of the Trop a few years ago either grilling or drinking beer before the game.
The “culture” in the Tampa/St Pete area is vastly different, for whatever reason.
They also have a terrible stadium that’s terribly inconvenient for fans to get to.
They don’t have one. The stadium is apparently nearly impossible to get to among other issues, like no one in Tampa caring about baseball not involving the Yankees.
Driving to a Rays game from much of Tampa, after work on a weeknight, is similar in a lot of ways to driving to a Red Sox game from Providence, after work on a weeknight.
They actually have decent TV ratings, but fans from St. Petersburg don’t go to games as much because of the drive, from what I’ve heard.
http://imgur.com/j74vKxb
Damn Jeter just had to retire, now the Yankees snow birds do not go to Rays home games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B1IQYD4Uew
The Angels have been bumbling along for quite some time. Changing their name to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim was quite asinine considering that they not only don’t play in the city of Los Angeles, they aren’t even in the same county. They buy billboards in the heart of LA but who in their right mind is going to slog through horrible rush hour traffic from LA to get to Anaheim to see a game mid-week. It’s hard enough to get to Dodger Stadium and it is located Downtown. The name change was quite tone deaf to local OC fans and this continues that pattern.
Because of a city-county consolidation many years ago, the city and county of Los Angeles are the same thing.
Indeed. And the Angels are in neither of them.
Nor are the New York Jets or New York Giants in the state of New York, much less the city. *Irrelevant*
It would be if the same product was available in New York City proper.
In almost no respect is this a true statement.
I accidentally upvoted this comment in my haste to reply. You are completely wrong. Even if you were correct it would have no bearing on the matter under discussion.
This was more about selling a TV package than selling tickets. LA is a much larger TV market, but you can’t tell a cable company you are a part of that market unless you market to it. It still made people in OC mad, but everyone kinda understood the financial aspect of the name change.
They changed the name and marketing a decade ago and their attendance and revenue boomed *for years*, and they negotiated a then-record local TV contract during that time period. Stop with the “alienation” nonsense. The attendance decline noted in this article corresponds with about 5 years of mediocre play and bad signings.
Interesting that the A’s have seen a year-over-year increase considering all the moves they made.
The organization has taken the approach that less high-ROI customers is better than more low-ROI customers. They haven’t priced out people of lower socioeconomic standing, as the article itself says. They’ve simply focused their efforts on deriving value where value actually exists. This isn’t a PR nightmare — it’s probably a shrewd decision. Simply driving more people to the park irrespective of in-park spend does not inherently create more value for the organization or the sport.
Of course it creates value, if you accept the premise that baseball fandom can be bred in pre-teen children through visits to the ballpark (which makes a lot of sense intuitively, and is supported by the fairly rigorous NYT analysis provided in the accompanying link). In addition to whatever else they are doing, there is no reason the Angels couldn’t “focus effort” on filling the lowest tier of seating with youngsters of modest means. Those seats are going unsold anyway, and it’s not like the Angels aren’t going to need revenue in 2025 …
Or you could be a fan of a team like the Red Sox, where they just let the market price those with little money out of games.
But minor league baseball games are cheap,more intimate, gives better seats, and doesn’t have 30,000 annoying people at them.
Yeah, PawSox and Sea Dogs games are clearly the move if you’re living in the Boston area. Much more so than Sox games.
While saying you are targeting wealthy customers in an interview is probably not a wise PR move, Orange County is one of the wealthiest regions in the county (and the Angels fan base is particularly upper-middle class), so the strategy makes sense.
Except they spend so much time targeting wealthy people in LA.
I’ve lived in Orange County my whole life. I’ve taken my son to countless Angels’ games in the upper deck. Then I took my son to a Dodger game. Then another. Now he doesn’t want to go to Angels’ games anymore. He says they are boring compared to Dodger games. I tend to agree. The Dodger fans know when to cheer and when they cheer they cheer with emotion. Usually when I go to a sporting event in Orange County you get dirty looks if you stand too long. And forget trying to stand for long stretches of time trying to change the momentum of a game with crowd noise.
Arte lost the traditional OC fan when he put LA in front of the team name. They felt less attached to the team. That’s not a big reason for the drop, but it’s a part of it.
I live right near the LA/Orange county line and like going to both Dodger & Angel games. I would agree that fans at Dodger games pay closer attention to the game. There’s more energy in the crowd for what’s going on on the field than at Angel games.
As someone who spent 30 of my years in So Cal it’s just flat out funny to hear this. For years the DODGERS were criticized with having fair weather fans who be pulling out by the 6th inning. People made an appearance and that was it. Angels fans, though far fewer in number, on average were committed and dedicated … much like the core fanbase for many long-suffering organizations.
Moreno and crew have turned the Angels fortunes around and up until the last Dodger ownership change, they created all of the positive buzz in the region. Things have swung back with the new ownership and the insane amount of spending they are doing. It’s once again “cool” to a Dodgers fan.
In the end I don’t see this a PR nightmare. The vast majority of “fans” happily joined in with Moreno in kicking Hamilton to the curb. And I’m willing to bet that very few of those on the lower socio-economic curve are ever going to hear about this new strategy. In fact, very few on ANY curve will know about it. As a fan, all I care about is the team making more money so that they can pour that money back into the organization.
I suspect that many of the people management isn’t interested in marketing to are aware of the comments but unaware they are in the undesirable group.
I don’t see anything wrong here. They are pricing tickets so everyone can afford them. Obviously, they want to target the more profitable customers, which is what any good business does.
I don’t think people understand how little the average ticket counts as part of a teams overall revenue. If a team sold 3 million 5 dollar tickets that’s only 15 million, not even 10% of the Angels payroll or 1 star player, and probably 5% of their overall revenue.
Sure, all those cheap ticket holders may become more profitable customers in the future, but generally people come to the park because they are already fans or those bringing them to the park are. You don’t need a commercial or newspaper ad to make you want to go to the game. Those people will always come depending on price and quality of the team. You don’t have to target them except to provide a good product on the field.
The big spenders OTOH have to be convinced to spend the money on better tickets. This is easily done by giving them status, better seats, and better food/beverage/service options which cost a fraction of what they pay. Need a bit more effort to get them to spend more, but they have it to spend so its worth the effort, unlike the average 5 dollar ticket holder.
The assertion that the team is letting the rich fans know they won’t have to intermingle with the dirty poor people is an eye roller. That small section of Diamond Club seats is a “special” pricey luxury item and they are trying to market it as such, no different than the penthouse suite at a hotel or a first class plane ticket. You could be sitting there because you are loaded or it could be a once-a-year splurge for someone who is not so loaded.
All you have to do is ask the Cardinals and Nats about the downside of almost free tickets ($2 Tuesdays) in the name of selling more concessions and attracting casual fans. You devalue your tickets to the point where fans are trained to wait for the inevitable discount tickets and you piss off your season ticket holders who paid full freight for the same game.
It’s not just the Diamond Club area. Many ballparks have club areas with nicer food options and nicer seats that are restricted to general admission holders. Minute Maid has a nice club section that is totally worth spending the extra money to sit in. Tickets range from about $55-120. As an added bonus, the area is generally less crowded. Honestly, it makes to try to encourage people to upgrade.
The reason for the club section at MMP is to have a section of the park with a liquor license. The rest of the park is beer/wine only.
Coke and Pepsi are failing to do just that.
My two cents is that the Angels should do exactly what they’re doing in marketing and that their only mistake was telling anybody about it. Business secrets should be kept secret.
A week ago Wednesday, on the spur of the moment, I went to see the Angels play the Padres in Anaheim. I’ve been going to Angels games for over forty years (including a World Series game), and have always enjoyed my experience. Last week, though, as I was showering up to go to the game, I forgot to shave. That small oversight apparently made a big difference. When I went to the ticket window before the game, I specifically asked for a seat in the Knothole Club in right field, an area that has a menu and wait staff and is priced higher than other seats in that area. Apparently, my scruffy beard was enough for the ticket vendor to think less of me, for when I got to my seat, I was most definitely not in the Knothole Club. I could see into the Knothole Club seating area, however, and noticed it was only two-thirds full, so they had not sold out the section.
My lesson to the rest of you: men, before going to an Angels game, remember to shave, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to throw on the Rolex and your Top Siders with those khaki pants. (Plus, buy your tickets in advance).
The Knothole Club stadium seating is entirely sold out to season seat holders. If they sold you a club level ticket they sold you access to the Knothole Club which was all the ticket window could do. If it is fine dining you are after, a back row Diamond Club ticket offers you the best value.
I’ve been to the Diamond Club, thank you, which is very exclusive and very expensive, no matter where you sit. That’s why I prefer the Knothole Club if I want a dining experience. Since I’ve had no trouble in the past buying single-game seats, online and in person, for the Knothole Club–yes, where you get to sit before those very shiny metal tabletops–I though it odd that I could not get a single-game seat this time. I was not told at the ticket window that the Knothole Club was for season ticket holders only. I asked for the Knothole Club and was sold a ticket that was two sections away.
The seats OUTSIDE the Knthole Club are season seats.
The seats INSIDE the club are unreserved and open ONLY to people with a club level ticket.
By selling you a ticket two sections over she sold you a ticket that gave you access to where you wanted.
Arte Moreno has to give a cut of ticket sales to the City of Anaheim after 2.6 Million tickets are sold. The current strategy (to screw the City of Anaheim out of revenue) boils down to NOT having ticket upsell spots on Angels telecasts for $5 ticket specials – a hallmark of the 2010-2014 games.
These ticket specials angered season seat holders that loved to re-sell games they were not using. Moreno has been on a campaign for many season to starve resellers – the club will not sell you a large number of seats if they don’t see your tickets coming to many games outside of the big three (Dodgers/Yankees/RedSox).
Anaheim Stadium’s Diamond Club and entire Club Section (which includes access to the Knothole Club) have been “off limits” to non-ticket holders since the then-owners Disney and the City of Anaheim rebuilt the Stadium (post-Rams departure) in 1998. Moreno has not changed a single thing about this. These sections offer in-seat wait-staff service.
this is interesting/makes sense. thanks for the info.
I’m not going to defend what the Angels officials said, but I will say that I it isn’t surprising that the Angels of all teams would be a team trying to cater to the rich as Orange County has a ton of really rich people living there.
Re: Getting children to play baseball.
The key is to get children playing, but to also do it in a fun way. There are many kids who start playing and then just don’t enjoy it and I think it is because the youth levels have become so hyper-competitive. The kids who aren’t that good just can’t have fun playing, so it’s important to find ways to market the game to kids who aren’t necessarily looking to become future stars.
So the assumptions the writer made (the Angels are screwing the poor) don’t line up with reality so he continues with the narrative anyway. This is bad journalism. Further, it’s left wing politics that I don’t need to see here on a analytical sports site.
The writer’s point is that even though the perception is mostly false, the perception is affecting ticket sales.
I grew up in SoCal, and enjoyed many a game at the three ball clubs down there. Another side of this argument is that pricing things too cheaply in Southern California attracts a certain element. For instance, at a Dodgers game, I’ve witnessed guys drunk off their ass pissing in trash cans outside the restroom. A few years ago, a Giants fan was nearly killed by Dodgers fans. Unless things have changed recently, you could never imagine that happening at an Angels or Padres game.
The same phenomenon can be seen between AT&T and o.Col, which are only a few miles apart.
To be clear, I’m not looking down on these fans. I personally think everyone should be able to afford a baseball game. But I can understand why a franchise would try to dissuade, rather than attract, them from coming to the ballpark.
I’m a long time Angel fan born and raised in Orange County, and the bottom line line is the Dodgers have a better team, stadium experience, and organization. The Angels had their chance to really make a dent in the Dodger fan base during the McCourt years, and they have failed in spectacular fashion. The contracts given to Pujols, Hamilton and Wilson, not to mention the Vernon Wells and Scott Kazmir disasters will hamper them for years to come. When Greinke walked across town to the Dodgers the writing was on the wall, and things have only gone downhill from there. The fact that Trout took a unbelievable hometown discount when he had all the leverage is the only thing keeping the attendance even semi-respectable, but with all of the discretionary dollar options in this region for baseball fans, the Dodgers are by far the best option now and in the future, and it’s not close. Squeezing every dollar out of the Orange County upper crust they can is the only way they are going to make any money for the foreseeable future.
Regarding the Angels PR: It’s a business and they need to be smart about who they target. I get that they target fans who spend money and I’m cool with it. The VP didn’t mince words so I see the challenges they face. I buy cheap tickets and I don’t spend much. Just thankful to have my team in my backyard. Just keep them profitable so they stay around. We have enough businesses leaving SoCal. I don’t want to lose another team.
From the article:
“The Braves were the biggest decliner after April, but the Rangers and their disappointing season have overtaken them”
Wait, what? The Rangers have to be considered one of the more pleasant surprises in the AL. They are certainly performing better than anyone reasonably expected. I don’t expect it will last, but there’s no way their 2015 season (to date) can possibly be considered a disappointment.
I’ve got to admit, I must be missing something here too. How are they discouraging people from coming? By having two options (“general” and “special”) on their website? That prevents intermingling? Or are they creating physical barriers in the stadium to keep the peons and the goldens apart, and having separate entrances, bathrooms and food concessions? Or is the issue just that they’re tacky and actually admitted that fans who spend more, bring the team more money – and this reality will insult those who spend less and discourage them from coming?