For many irrational reasons, I have consciously decided to put myself through the experience of being an Oakland A’s season-ticket holder for the past three years. Every year since I joined this small, delusional, and fanatical club, the price of season tickets has gone up by a sizable amount. I say “sizable” as an intentionally unscientific term, as I realize there’s a lot that goes into it, but the increases have been more than noticeable for my section of the stadium, which is not one of the highest-priced nor one of the very-lowest. The A’s were really good between 2012 and 2014, so I understood that the increase was probably just the price of success, and left it at that. We all know what happened to the A’s in 2015, however: they lost 94 games. It was a woeful, terrible year. You can’t come up with a superlative to represent what trading Josh Donaldson and then losing 94 games is like. It felt — and feels — exactly what it sounds like reading that sentence.
It was with some confusion, then, that I looked at the prices of tickets this January and saw that the prices had stayed steady or increased, especially for those teams or dates that are denoted as top tier. As most teams now do, the A’s have adopted a dynamic pricing model for their ticket sales, which assigns higher pricing to favorable matchups, promotions, days of the week, etc. It’s a complicated and flexible model, and there’s the chance that holding off on buying tickets now might actually save money if certain circumstances arise. The possibility of the opposite is true, however, which is the point (for the A’s) of adopting the model. The fact remains, however: the A’s were one of the worst teams in baseball during 2015, yet one wouldn’t know it from the ticket-price differences between 2015 and 2016.
My own personal situation with the A’s is secondary to what we’re going to be looking at today, however, as it was simply the spark that caused me to ask a myself a few questions: what is the relationship between winning, losing, and ticket prices? How much do new stadiums increase ticket prices? What role does the larger economy play? And, on a deeper level — whether it’s actually the case or not — should teams have a moral obligation to own up to their team’s recent failures by adjusting ticket prices? With all those questions and a few more in mind, I set out to try to answer them.
The data for this sort of undertaking is inherently scattershot. There isn’t a great repository of, say, the lowest-priced ticket for every team over the past 10 years. At least not one I could find. The best resource I found was a site called Team Marketing, which assembles a yearly “Fan Cost Index” for each team and the league as a whole. In addition to factoring in the cost of beer, food, etc. into this index, they also log the cost of an average ticket — that is, the cost of a non-premium ticket based on season-ticket prices. The average is weighted to weed out the discrepancies of more or fewer seats in areas that don’t cost the same, so it’s actually a pretty representative figure of a strictly average ticket. The only knock against it is that the teams get to decide what is “general” seating and what is “premium,” but that’s splitting hairs a little bit, and this information is great in that it is one of the few available datasets not based on the secondary market for tickets. The data goes back to 2007, so I’ve pulled everything and assembled them in some tidy graphs for us to look at. For reference, here’s the source: 2015 Team Marketing MLB Report. It’s worth a look.
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