http://espn.go.com/mlb/columns/caple_jim/1556661.html
Continued losing main reason for empty parks
By Jim Caple
ESPN.com
The Milwaukee Brewers drew 44,561 fans total for a three-game series with Cincinnati. Their attendance is down almost 4,000 fans from this time last year, which was down 10,000 fans from the previous season. Attendance has declined so much that the team is considering closing sections of the stadium's upper-deck.
I can't help but take grim satisfaction in this. I have nothing against the Brewers or their fans, but Bud Selig has spent the past decade telling everyone that new stadiums are the answer to every baseball problem except organ music and Pete Rose's haircut. As recently as spring training, he said that the Athletics, who have averaged 96 victories a season since 1999, need a new stadium in order to compete.
Meanwhile, barely three seasons in their new stadium, his Brewers (or, I'm sorry, his "family's'' Brewers) are now drawing fewer fans than they did in all but three of their final 14 years at old "inadequate'' County Stadium. Attendance is so low even Bob Uecker could get in the front row.
The Brewers aren't alone. In their third year at their new stadium, the Tigers are averaging fewer fans (15,336) than they did in all but one of their final 24 seasons at Tiger Stadium. In their third year at their new stadium, the Pirates are averaging fewer fans than they did in all but three of their final 13 seasons at Three Rivers Stadium.
Attendance is down throughout baseball and there are plenty of reasons for this. With the war in Iraq, interest in actually going to the stadium declined. The economy is bad. Ticket prices are still high. In a way, those are good reasons. As soon as the economy turns around, attendance should improve. In a way, those are bad reasons. There isn't much baseball can do about improving the economy, other than expanding the rosters from 25 men per team to 250,000. And there aren't nearly enough left-handed relievers out there to do that, even when you count Jesse Orosco.
The most glaring aspect of the decline is where it has occurred. Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Texas, even Baltimore, are all enduring tremendously reduced attendance from when their new stadiums first opened. The stadiums that would supposedly solve every economic problem are now a problem themselves.
It's not that they aren't great places to watch baseball. The vast majority are -- and they ought to be, given their cost to the taxpayers. Camden Yards and Pac Bell Park, in particular, aren't just wonderful stadiums, they are baseball treasures.
The stadiums were bad for other reasons, though. One, they rewarded too many organizations that didn't deserve it. Teams that ran themselves poorly and inefficiently didn't learn from their mistakes and change their business models. They merely hit up their communities for a new stadium and went right back to their old ways. The vast money generated at the new stadiums fooled these teams into thinking they suddenly were running their teams well when they actually were just benefiting from temporary corporate welfare.
The stadiums resulted in a huge infusion of cash, but teams that had spent their previous limited resources foolishly simply spent their financial windfall just as foolishly. (As bad and as young as the Tigers are on the field, how could the front office possibly have put itself on the hook for $56 million in salaries?).
It was like giving a panhandler a dollar. Only instead of spending the money on a cheap bottle of booze, they spent their handouts on multi-year contracts for Damion Easley.
This wouldn't be so bad -- after all, there are always going to be teams that waste their money -- except for one thing. The increased stadium revenue drove up player salaries even further, causing team expenses to swell like Mo Vaughn on All-U-Can-Eat Night. And those expenses didn't increase just when times were flush, they increased for years down the road when attendance began falling off.
When Camden Yards opened in 1992, the average major league payroll was roughly $29 million. A decade later, after a dozen retro-parks had opened, the average payroll had increased to about $67 million.
In other words, the price of being average more than doubled. That wasn't exclusively due to the new stadiums, but a lot of it was. It contributed to a vicious cycle that just got worse with every new stadium built.
The owners have been selling their stadium snake oil for a decade now and a couple teams definitely benefited from it early on (so do the people who get in early on a pyramid scheme). But the two obvious facts they always ignored have now become unavoidable: When every team has a spectacular new stadium, some teams still have losing records every season. And fans do not like paying money to see their team lose no matter how many luxury suites a stadium has.
There is only one team that can lose season after season and still regularly draw sellout crowds because of its ballpark. And the Cubs play in a stadium that was built 89 years ago.
