The view from section 219, row 14 in the Metrodome wasn’t bad, though being in the middle of a long row meant a night spent pasted to the tiny seats. Minnesota nice only goes so far, so there was no chance of getting up and crawling over people to the aisle unless things got real serious.
For 26 bucks each, the upper deck seats weren’t exactly a bargain, but not much is in baseball these days. I was thinking about that as I added up in my head what it cost the beleaguered older couple in the next row with four grandkids in tow to take in a Twins game.
Maybe $300 for the night, figuring in about $25 in gas to take the minivan to the game and another $15 to park it nearby. They could have gotten by on less, but in the six innings they stayed the group managed to consume mass amounts of soda, popcorn and pizza.
I bring this up because the other thing that struck me about the game was how many empty seats there were for one of the biggest games of the year in Minneapolis. It was Saturday, the Twins were riding a 10-game winning streak, and the Milwaukee Brewers were in town.
A couple weeks earlier, I noticed the same thing in San Diego. The hated Dodgers were playing the Padres, yet you could walk up just before the game and score a seat almost anywhere in Petco Park.
It’s purely anecdotal, of course. Baseball will tell you everything is great and point to hefty ticket sales that likely will top 80 million this year.
They might be right. Just the other day, Manny Ramirez had to beat down the 64-year-old traveling secretary for the Red Sox when he couldn’t immediately fulfill a request for 16 tickets to a sold-out game with the Astros.
But look around almost any stadium outside of Boston or New York, and you’ll see large chunks of prime seats going unused – whether the game is sold out or not.
The faltering economy could be to blame, as could the price of gas, which is beginning to rival that of beer at stadiums. If ticket prices that increased 10.9 percent this season alone don’t make mom and dad think twice about taking the kids, maybe the cost of a tank of gas will.
Or maybe baseball isn’t delivering on what brought fans back to ballpark in the first place in the late ’90s and touched off today’s attendance boom – the big home run.
Hardly anyone is hitting them in the American League, where halfway through the season no one has reached the 20 home run mark. It’s not much better in the senior circuit, where two second basemen, of all things, share the home run lead with 23.
It wasn’t long ago that Barry Bonds hit 73 out in one season and 60 meant nothing. Now there’s a good chance no one will hit 50 for the first time in four years.
It might be pure coincidence that home runs went down about the same time baseball began serious testing for steroids and amphetamines, but they did. Two years ago, baseball averaged 2.23 home runs a game, but even as bats get harder and ball parks seem to grow smaller, the average is 1.95 a game so far this season, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
Gas prices or home runs, take your pick. Surely in a game built on numbers there is an economist somewhere who can track corresponding graphs versus attendance for each.
There’s not much baseball can do about the cost of fuel, but there might be a fix for the home run problem. The greatest home run hitter of all time remains unemployed while, not coincidentally, attendance has slumped by about 5,000 a game in San Francisco.
Bonds is getting so desperate that his agent recently said he would play for free if only someone would take a chance on him.
Love him or hate him, at that price it might be worth filling up the tank for a drive to the ballpark.
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Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlbergap.org
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