I’ve avoided postseason baseball this year after my team, the Texas Rangers, melted like ice in a hot mouth. The only spark of interest came when team president Nolan Ryan (my favorite player of all-time) criticized the Rangers’ star player, Josh Hamilton, for giving up chewing tobacco at the end of the season.
I tuned back in after hearing Jim Rome point out on his radio show that the New York Yankees have lost their home field edge. Besides being down 2-0 to the Detroit Tigers, the Yankees are playing tepidly on their home turf, and the crowds are sparse and either disinterested or flat-out angry. Far from the raucous Bronx crowds that have historically weighed heavily on the minds of visiting teams, players like the Tigers’ Quintin Berry actually look forward to playing the Yankees:
This is a very easy place to play now. Coming from Oakland, the fans there were so rowdy. It was easier to come here.
Via New York Daily News
Several reasons for the decline in attendance including the Yankees’ new and ‘improved’ stadium and its ticket pricing:
Since the opening of the new Yankee Stadium, the crowds have not had the same energy. Anyone who has spent a considerable amount of time in both venues can attest to that. With approximately 8,000 fewer seats positioned much further away from the field, the new Stadium simply can’t match the structural and acoustic qualities that made the old place feel like a cauldron of sound. However, that’s not the only reason the new place lacks the same vibe as the old one.
The Yankees’ pricing strategy with the new Yankee Stadium makes perfect economic sense. By gouging corporate clients, the team can maximize revenue from a more inelastic customer base. Put more simply, selling one ticket for $500 is the same as selling five for $100, so, from an economic standpoint, it doesn’t really matter whether or not Yankee Stadium is filled to capacity. Of course, empty seats don’t make noise.
Unfortunately, what works financially hasn’t been as aesthetically pleasing. Not only has Yankee Stadium regularly featured empty seats scattered all over the premium lower level sections, but the clientele seems more interested in where they are than whom they are watching. In addition to pricing out a more passionate cross-section of their fan base (or, at least, moving them further away from the field), the added amenities of the new ballpark have become the drawing card. So, instead of rooting for the home team, some fans have opted to cheer from the comfort of a sit down restaurant while snacking on filet mignon and sipping chardonnay.
Besides just the impact on the number of fans attending home games, high ticket prices impact the types of fans that show up to the ballpark. After building a suite-filled stadium in 2009 across the street from the old House that Ruth Built, the Yankees have seen a decrease in attendance. The stadium’s high-priced Legends seating area has shown bald spots, sometimes due to unsold tickets but also because the occupiers of those tickets spend more time in the stadium’s fancy restaurants instead of in their seat.
A.J. Burnett in front of empty high priced seats
Along with a decline of about 2,700 in attendance for each game since the ballpark’s 2010 peak, the enthusiasm for Yankee game attendance has shifted from tribalism to status-hunting. As seems to be happening in New York City in general, elites are crowding out loyal prole sports fans and creating what appears to some fans to be a caste system:
The new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009, at a cost of $1.3 billion to build. To pay for it, the Yankees established a block of field-level box seats that cannot be accessed by fans in cheaper seats, who were able to bring their children down to the front row to pursue autographs before games in the old stadium.
“The new place has never quite had the feel of the old place,” says Ian O’Connor, who writes for ESPN New York and hosts a sports talk show on ESPN Radio. “There is this concrete moat that has created a caste system, and I think people resent that.”
O’Connor, author of the biography “The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter,” remembers sitting just behind that moat with his son this season and watching as Jeter jogged in from batting practice with a ball he was looking to present to a youngster, something he often did in the old stadium. But there were no children around the dugout.
“So he ended up flipping the ball to Donald Trump,” O’Connor said. “I think that’s the perfect example of what’s happened.
Last year, the New York Times compared the atmosphere of the new Yankee stadium to the old:
Fifteen years ago, with the Yankees in the midst of a triumphant pennant race that would blossom into a dynastic run, a reporter for The New York Times spent weeks absorbing the atmosphere at their old stadium, ruminating on what it meant to be a fan of the team.
…
But there was, too, a “genuine ugliness” that pervaded the stadium’s stands and blighted its fandom. Young men — 9 years young — yelled obscenities at opposing players. Fans sexually groped one another. Baseball in the Bronx, the reporter concluded, could often be “a repository for rage, bitterness, desperation.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” the reporter noted, “but, geez, there were a lot of creeps out there.”
Last week, the same week the Yankees placed their handsome shortstop, now 36, on the disabled list with a bum leg, another reporter ventured into the right-field bleachers of the team’s ballpark, across the street from the old one, to see what, if anything, had changed. The survey was hardly comprehensive, the observations hardly definitive.
But in short, there seemed to be far fewer creeps.
…
Before the game, four men, each wearing shorts and decked out in Yankees paraphernalia, debated the relative value of wines from Argentina and Chile as they waited for the rain to pass. Nearby, a woman waited to order a glass of her own. “This is like being at the opera,” she said. There were numerous Creatures munching $16 sushi platters, sipping $12 gin cocktails. Two were observed going over the calorie counts of their snacks.
…
In 1996, the Times reporter wrote that the Yankee Stadium crowd was “overwhelmingly male” and “overwhelmingly white.” The latter holds true today, throughout the stadium, and particularly in the bleachers.
Yet the gender balance seems to have shifted. There were loads of women everywhere, the bleachers included. There were couples dressed in matching shirts, entire families, mothers shepherding packs of children, girls with ponytails curling out from pink caps, and, thankfully, no catcalls.
If cities can experience gentrification – much as New York City has – then why can’t sports teams? We also see the possibility that the larger female presence at the ballpark also impacts the overall vibrancy of ballpark culture. The changed venue which causes the increased cost of attendance impacts the class/gender dynamic – the very essence – of the fan base.
All of this only matters if you value traditional ballpark culture (no surprise, I do).
In a simple model of a team’s fan base, you have proles and fat-cats. The Yankees are probably the best example of a team which has appealed to both groups. The storied history of the team is a source of pride for locals of all classes, and transplants are able to leech off of this legacy of success by donning a Yankee cap.
But fat cat fans are reserved, not just in their seating arrangements but also in their ballpark demeanor. The polite opera-friendly behavior cited in the pieces above is a good indicator of the trend. On the flip side, prole fans are tribalists out for blood. They are the heart and the spirit of any team. Fat cats appreciate that the proles are in attendance. They add diversity and authenticity, but NIMBY – over in the cheap seats instead (while they last).
Fat cats increase revenue, but proles increase the type of experience valued by what are the baseball version of the music-snob hipster. As with the arts and other modes of culture – of which New York City is the U.S.’s chief manufacturer – there is a feedback loop between the two groups. Proles provide a lot of the color; fat cats provide the funds. The two groups have maintained a silent if not contentious balance, and any tilt towards one extreme or the other threatens to uproot the symbiotic relationship. Building a fancy new stadium full of comfortable amenities is a shock to this relationship. One suspects that the toilets in the new Yankee stadium are especially impressive compared to their predecessors and that one set of Yankees fans care and one set do not.
In his book The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch critiqued (p. 103) the culture and differentiated the sport expertise held by proles and the arts expertise held by elites. With sport, the biggest fans often participated as kids and have a vast knowledge of the particular game, a statement which is often used to describe the Bleacher Creatures:
The same can hardly be said for the audience for artistic performance, even though amateur musicians, dancers, actors, and painters may still compromise a small nucleus of the audience. Constant experimentation in the arts has created so much confusion about standards that the only surviving measure of excellence is novelty and shock value, which in a jaded time often resides in a work’s sheer ugliness and banality. In sport, on the other hand, novelty and rapid shifts of fashion play a small part in games’ appeal to a discriminating audience.
While sports commissioners tinker with rules and styles in order to maximize profit, the status quo is maintained. Despite how radicals may want to use them, the proles embrace the stagnation and tradition. And at the ballpark, to continue with this broadly-painted picture, it is the proles who are the experts while the new elites have no real idea what’s going on. The crowding out of the proles diminishes the overall knowledge base in attendance at each game. How does that effect the game in the long term? Perhaps the elites match the same level of expertise, but then they also aren’t even invested to the core of their identity. They have no incentive to carry the mantle.
Yankees’ businessmen have determined their long term strategy and are probably willing to sacrifice old ballpark culture for a bit more refinement. One wonders though if snuffing out the democratized ballpark experience which has served as a common cultural touch point across all classes will negatively impact the outside interest in the ball club. Does expensive ball game attendance decrease the number of fans watching on TV? Does it diminish their level of enthusiasm for the team? And then the other question as hit on by Detroit’s outfielder: Does a blase L.A. style fan base decrease the competitiveness of the home team? Given all of the sabermetrics floating around to analyze player value-add, how many wins do raucous fans provide their team? And how much does each win impact the bottom line?
Prole level sports fans tie their identities to their teams. Fat cat sports fans are fair-weather and don’t deeply identify. See: Washington Nationals who have been the biggest benefactor of fair-weather fandom in recent memory. Not only was their stadium built amid complaints of a long-term anti-Chocolate City gentrification strategy, but this faux fandom stems from D.C.’s position as a city full of intra-national immigrants who lack strong non-work related social networks. The bandwagon effect is strongest among these dynamic professionals who desperately want to plug in and do so by wearing their Strausberg jerseys.
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Nolan Ryan really needs to quit making stupid public statements about Josh Hamilton. By annoying Josh Hamilton he’s just driving up the price it could take to resign him in Texas.
“some fans have opted to cheer from the comfort of a sit down restaurant while snacking on filet mignon and sipping chardonnay.”
….
Chardonnay with filet mignon? Merlot, please! Don’t these people know anything?
I believe the same thing has happened to Fenway Park, once a prole temple.
You should next write a contrasting article about how Dodger stadium has been taken over by Mexican gang members.
white people ruin everyhting
Camlost is right about Nolan Ryan antagonizing Hamilton. I’ve never seen a GM ride a player during a contract year for the weirdest stuff, especially when they hit 40+ HRs while missing games.
The gentrification of arenas has been happening for years and is finally coming to the MLB as the old stadiums get cycled out in the big markets. Shea went for the same big bucks approach that the Yankees did. The gentrification of all sports hit the NBA earliest due to the cycling out of old arenas earlier than replacement of the grand MLB cathedrals. The NFL seems to avoid this due to the short 8 games once a week set up of their season.
Fenway went through its prole replacement as going to a Sox game became a social event. Great marketing timed with an upswing in the team during the Pedro-Nomar era. In the mid-’90s, my dad would drive me down from Maine same day and buy tickets at the window for a Clemens start or a good match up. Fenway would be 3/4 full some games even then. That went away when the Sox had new ownership that figured out how to market the team and they got Pedro/Nomar. Once it became a social event, the demand for tix went up. Fenway also only has 35K seats. Add in winning a title, and the bandwagon of pink hats took off.
Anti-Racist. Did you see our communication yesterday about white boys saying what they want. You are instructed to interdict more and with more force.
Anti-racist comes close when he says “white people ruin everything.” Except the true statement is “wealthy Liberal white people ruin everything.” And they do. Now baseball stadiums are becoming another temple of white-ness for wealthy whites, while the white proles they hate hate hate get subjected to Section 8 Orc invasions, out-sourced manufacturing jobs, in-sourced low-wage brown hordes, and a hundred other species of wealthy white nihilism.
The NFL experience is being gentrified as well. A Patriots game used to be one of the purest prole experiences in the Boston area, and the educated classes avoided Shaefer Stadium like the plague*. Now Patriots games are family friendly, rowdy behavior is punishd and there’s even a no alcohol section. As a result the Pats have almost no home field advantage these days. It sounds like the same trend is happening in Dallas and Washington. At least Jets fans will always be proles…
*This is where the myth arose that “no one in New England liked the Pats before Brady (or Bledsoe)”. Not true at all, before Kraft proles loved the Pats, but no one else did. Kraft is a marketing genius.
Yeah, but new Cowboys stadium is a wondrous amazing facility. It has a whopping capacity of 80,000 also, with another 20,000 in the endzone standing areas. Prices there partly reflect demand.
I’ve read that the Rangers aren’t even interested in resigning Hamilton, though that could just be posturing.
Nowadays if you want prole vibrancy in the cheap seats the place to go is an NFL game. My experience sitting in the (not so) cheap seats at a Cowboys game was completely different from the upper deck at a Rangers game.
The Rangers crowd has a prole element, but most of them seem to be white families with kids in tow. But there’s plenty of white-collars mixed in and even some SWPLs. The fans seemed to care, while generally being well-behaved.
The Cowboys are totally different. If you want rowdy, foul-mouthed, raucous prole fanatics you should go there. Mexican, white and even some blacks, none of them seem to mind the incredible ticket prices and $8 Miller Lites. I found the idea of Mexican tailgaters really amusing.
Anyway, the truth is baseball has just lost its place in the imagination of American proledom. The East Coast has been the last holdout of prole baseball I think. Even at my last visit to a Cubs game the lack of bleacher bums at a mid-week day game was disappointing. Times have changed. And smart teams have realized that nostalgic SWPLs are the future.
Ravens games are prole experience par excellence. Tremendous working class support in (white) east and southeast Baltimore and lower-class southern suburbs. Purple jerseys everywhere.
@peterike – You get a cookie. Wealthy white libs ruin everything.
I refuse to attend an Eagles game. Apparently, it’s no place for a lady.
I think good fans should be willing to endure some discomfort to attend an event. Meaning: exposure to the elements, uncomfortable seats, lousy food and cheap beer. Woodstock sounds like it was a nightmare.
The most memorable Penn State football game for me, was the one where it poured rain the entire game.
I refuse to attend an Eagles game. Apparently, it’s no place for a lady.
It’s no place for anyone who wants to see good football considering that the Eagles have never actually won anything, despite having the most obnoxious fans in the world of sports.
Ravens games are nice, best fanbase I’ve ever seen.
Many years ago, when I was living in Chicago I used to go to a lot of Cubs games. I remember once, I was sitting next to a guy who started explaining the strategy of the game to me. When he correctly forecast that the next play was going to be a hit and run with the ball hit between the shortstop and 3rd baseman because the short stop was over rotated, I was really impressed. I asked him what he did. He looked at me and said that he worked at a big steel plant separating the slag from the steel that could be recovered. He said that job took half an hour to learn and he had been doing it for 25 years. He was a true fan.
“Eagles have never actually won anything”
Except against the Redskins. Back in the day when I was a fanatical Skins fan, it was understood that we’ll always fuck up or choke in crucial games against the Eagles.
Except against the Redskins.
Yeah, they’re great in the regular season. But the Eagles are the only team in their division (NFC East) to never win a Super Bowl.
I’ve read that the Rangers aren’t even interested in resigning Hamilton, though that could just be posturing.
The Rangers aren’t interested in resigning him at the type of outrageous max deal that it would take to lock him down at this point. They’re learning from the mistakes of the LA Angels, who have $225 million more to pay to a guy who is over 30, just like Hamilton.
The UNC Tar Heels have a similar “wine and cheese” crowd in that they built their basketball arena using private (rich) donors and alumni, who have lifetime ownership of the seats closest to the floor. Even when they’re ranked #1 in the country and playing another powerhouse college team you can still hear a pin drop out the on the court since their largely older crowd is not demonstrative at all.
good post. hits on a major cultural trend that illuminates a broader theme.
“the enthusiasm for Yankee game attendance has shifted from tribalism to status-hunting.”
stepping back from the lens of sports and seeing the big picture, it can be argued that late stage western experience — american culture in total — is one giant shift from tribalism to status whoring. from blood and soil to propositional self-aggrandizement. from local bonhomie to transnational globalist.
what we are witnessing is the dismantling of shared tribal experience that historically, at least in america, helped bridge divides between the classes, in favor of moats, walls and no access points to ground level seats. the elite no longer feel noblesse oblige or even a rudimentary sense of commonality with their native brethren in the lesser classes — the rabble are viewed now with suspicion, hate and intolerance. ethnic and racial diversity, a fiction sustained by a gossamer thin thread as it is, certainly exacerbates and encourages fat cat separation from alley cat.
if we were living in a more violent time without the pacifying distractions of modern tech, i’d almost think we were watching a new french revolution germinate right in the ground beneath our feet. it may yet still happen. the uneasy detente between fat cat funds and alley cat fun could come to crashing end when one, or both, groups decide to take their ball and go home. or throw it through the neighbor’s window.
Yes, nearly all shared cultural institutions and experiences are now fragmented. Novelty and exclusion is the game. Some of this is technology (1000 v 3 channels), but much is just a change from group values to individual values.
You can even see the effect in church and faith generally where many churches have become like niche players.
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
(0) You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realize that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
(1) The reasons are obvious. In the first place the parochial organization should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires. The congregational principle, on the other hand, makes each church into a kind of club, and finally, if all goes well, into a coterie or faction. In the second place, the search for a “suitable” church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil. What He wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise—does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncomment, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going. (You see how groveling, how unspiritual, how irredeemably vulgar He is!) This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper. So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighboring churches as soon as possible. Your record up to date has not given us much satisfaction.
“Given all of the sabermetrics floating around to analyze player value-add, how many wins do raucous fans provide their team? And how much does each win impact the bottom line?”
Teams could probably look at that, but I doubt any fan could; getting the data would be difficult if not impossible, at least in terms of raucous fans. How do you measure that, anyway? I imagine if I were looking at this for a baseball team, I’d have them install a decibel meter. Without that, I don’t know how you measure the raucousness of fans.
Calculating how much each win impacts the bottom line is straightforward if you know how much money the team makes, but otherwise impossible.
Although I left NY many years ago and now live in a rural western town, I grew up in the Bronx four subway stops north of Yankee Stadium. I still can remember attending a game in 1976 with a friend and sitting behind a row of Puerto Rican kids from the neighborhood who loved the game and could still afford the price. I remember a 1971 heated (but not violent!) argument over obscure stats between two fans (one white and one black) which continued out on the street after the game where the two were poring over record books that they had purchased. Even as recently as the mid-90s I could come up from the NJ swamps, pay $12-15 and still sit in the last couple of rows of the upper deck with a commanding (if distant) view of the field.
Two years ago on a visit back I took my then 12-year old son and med student nephew from Philadelphia to see the Yankees play the Houston Astros in the new stadium. $180 for three of the “cheap seats” almost behind the third-baseline foul pole, $23 for parking, etc. I won’t be going back again. Yes, you bet it’s become a status thing, a policy started by George Steinbrenner to discourage the “wrong” sort of people from the stands.
Your Nationals analysis is a common one, but its not quite right (and coming from a Rangers fan is something one should do with some modesty). The Nationals (and Capitals fans) do not have the pedigree of the Redskin fan base, but Washington had a lot of baseball fans that grew up Orioles fans and they developed deep grievances against Peter Angelos and were ready for a local team. I remember going to games in RFK and those fans were there even were losing 90+ games a season. Most of the bandwagon fans on the message forums and so forth seem like college kids and teenagers who never followed another team and not the transients you talk about (though I guess I fall into that category).
As someone who grew up in the Great State, my opinion about your Nationals analysis is the same one I have of the Ranger fan base which was miniscule most of my upbringing. As an Astros fan, its depressing to see Rangers jerseys in Austin and San Antonio that used to be Astros jerseys, but I guess there are a lot of people in Texas who frontrunners (and the disturbing number of Cowboys fans that I grew up with in Houston, god I hated those people).
I watched the Korean Grand Prix last weekend. Most popular sport in the world and they had half empty seating sections.
The world does not operate according to field of dreams. If you build it, they will not just come. They will come if they’re interested, can afford it, and it’s convenient.
Still the Yankees, Korea, etc will still make money, for the rest of us everyday folk we’re left with a boatload of half-empty strip malls on every corner due to the same principle.
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