THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tango, why not just set up a google spreadsheet and we could compute the ItB FCI for an actual average family?

That seems like a good idea.  I’ll set one up after lunch.

Here’s the link to Google Docs.  At the bottom right, you can click “Edit”.  You have to have a Google account.

If you are going to pass a link to your buddies on other teams, pass a link to this blog entry, and not the google docs. 

Here are the instructions:
1. Fill in the ticket prices for adults and children, for the same section.  The location of the seats should be either:
- upper deck at the 1B bag (you should be able to draw a straight line from 2B to 1B to you, that is perpendicular to the foul line)
- or the level below upperdeck, in the OF, without passing the fence
Select whichever is the lower-priced one. 

At Busch, for example:
http://stlouis.cardinals.mlb.com/stl/ballpark/seating_pricing.jsp
You have section 442 ($13 and $7) or section 337 ($28 and $28).

2. For parking, put in the best prices you can find at a “decent” parking lot, that is no more than 5 minutes away, and preferably 2-3 minutes away.  A decent parking lot lets you park your own car, and keep your keys.  The lot itself is paved.

3. The hotdog should be the footlong ones, italian sausage, or polish kielbasa, and not the thin 6-inch ones. 

4. For the others, only update the numbers if the TMR report was wrong.  The numbers in the spreadsheet are exactly from their site.  A 12-oz beer is 341 ml, and is a regular-sized bottle.

5. Once a line has been filled-in, don’t bother updating it.  Post your message here instead, and I’ll investigate further.

Go.

I’m coming up with “view only”

http://seattle.mariners.mlb.com/sea/ballpark/seating_pricing.jsp

I’m coming up with 18$ adult and child.  I don’t recall them having cheaper seats for kids, but I’ve been wrong in the past.  I would update the parking price point to 20$

For Fenway, I’d make it Section 8, 27$:
http://boston.redsox.mlb.com/bos/ticketing/seating_pricing.jsp

A’s, 211 and 105 are each 30$.
http://oakland.athletics.mlb.com/oak/ballpark/seating_chart.jsp

Fenway and A’s have the smallest seating capacity I believe, so, they are a bit more expensive.

Yanks, Section 11 is 19$.
http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/nyy/ticketing/seating_pricing.jsp

Shea, Section 13 Upper and Section 17 Mezz is 17$.
http://newyork.mets.mlb.com/nym/ticketing/seating_pricing.jsp

Shea offers multi-tiered pricing.  I should specify that it must be a July-Aug game (summer break), or a weekend game.  For the Mets, that means the Silver package or better.

Just off these 5 parks, it seems that 40$ for tickets for a father-son outing seems to be the price point.

Hmmm, seems that Google Docs forces me to invite people to be collaboraters, and I can’t just open it up at will.  Since sending the invites is more work than it’s worth, just post it in here, and I’ll update the file periodically.

If you check out the Baseball Prospectus archives, Doug Pappas was in the middle of a series fixing the Fan Cost Index when he died. I put the link to the first column in the ‘Website’ field, so you can click on my name to read it. Pappas actually broke it down into four realistic categories, to represent the most common types of game-goers.

Miller Park, Brewers
http://milwaukee.brewers.mlb.com/mil/ticketing/seating_pricing.jsp

I think this is one TMR got right. Using your methods tango, you are looking at section 415 ($13, $18) or section 213 in the deck below ($32, $36). Personally, if i’m taking kids, i do the $13 tickets, those are very fine seats. Using $18 (TMR’s value) as the average works fine though.

I guess this is why Sports Illustrated selected Miller Park as the best baseball value per dollar venue for 2005.

(SIDE NOTE: if you are going to Miller Park, section 126 is the best value IMO. For weeknights, walk up early enough and you can be in the first 10 rows on the field for 33$. You’ll be sitting just a peanut toss away from the $80 tickets.)

Anthony: thanks!  Wonder why no one’s taken up the cause.  Just requires some investigating, and would be good publicity.

Jacob: 13$ is a fantastic deal.  Are the concession and parking prices ok on TMR?

The $13 ticket is a great deal, and that’s where the families typically end up.

Yeah, parking is right on. the $7.00 lot is huge, great for tailgating, and is at most a 5-10 minute walk to the park (one beers worth).

The concessions are listed a tad low if anything. I think the good sausages are $3.50/$4.00 but i’ve gotten the $2.75 hot dog a few times, and it’s a respectable tube meat, certainly for the price. I’ll pay $6.00 for the non-macro brews, but i think those might be 20oz, and not 16oz.

Also, if you want to sit in “Bernie’s Terrace” (I did for the very first game at miller park, a friday night spring training game) it’s only $5, but you are actually above the foul pole in LF and with the roof closed the exhaust system actually eliminates the game sounds. But it gets you into the game. Then there are the $1 Uecker Seats (obstructed view). And the promotion schedule, which offers many half-price games.

http://milwaukee.brewers.mlb.com/schedule/promotions.jsp?c_id=mil

We have it pretty good in Milwaukee. Great town to be a baseball fan in.

In my sports business classes, FCI has come up on several occasions, but only to compare FCI across teams and leagues.  FCI is used as a standard (and they specify the size of the beer, btw) for comparison purposes, and I doubt many people would argue with what you’re saying.

Yes, it’s not terribly realistic for a particular family, and as Pappas’s work gets into, there are different types of fans with different expenditure patterns.  (for example, me and three college buddies can get into Astros games, smuggling our own food in, and spend less than $30 combined for the night, a far cry from the $192 FCI.)

But the real use of FCI is to compare relative costs between, say, attending a Red Sox game and a Royals game or even a New England Patriots game.  You could also get a decent approximation of how much the cost of attending a game has increased over recent years.

I know they specify the size of the beer, since that’s in my spreadsheet.  However, remarkably, instead of using cost of beer per 24 or 48 oz in their FCI, they use cost of two beers!  Reminds me of a friend, who filling out a questionnaire on health, says she drinks “1” per day for wine.  She didn’t specify it was 1 26oz bottle, not a 4oz glass.  In any case, that is very poor and sloppy.

FCI is *not* presented as a comparative study, but rather as a “see how expensive it is” presentation.  If they wanted to focus on that, they would index say Yankee Stadium, 1990 at “1.00”, and present all their results relative to that.

FCI is a marketing tool, pure and simple.  It drives traffic, and thousands of media outlets pick it up every year, because they can’t tell the difference between crap and quality.  When I was 14 years old, I would have done something like they did.

Chris Jaffe presents more ticket add-on prices.  These can be considered “non-walkup” prices, or “reservation” prices:

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-17-ticket-that-costs-25/

He also points to a Jeff Sackmann article that I enjoyed the first time I read it, and forgot to link here:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-7-ballpark-brewskie/