Rain Man Theater: How Significantly Does A New Stadium Impact Attendance?
The other day I was helping Tom Cruise count cards at a Las Vegas casino, and I got to thinking. The final bits of the Mets’ Shea Stadium were demolished yesterday. There are several reasons for building a new stadium — publicity, the possibility of hosting All-Star festivities, a spike in property value — but the most lucrative element is certainly improved ticket revenue. A new stadium tends to pay for itself over the long run, but given that we’re in the start/middle/whatever of a recession, it seems that the immediate impact on attendance is especially important.
Major League Baseball has built plenty of stadiums over the past twenty years, so I put together a few graphs to find out whether a trend can be spotted. First up: the White Sox’s new Comiskey Park, opened in 1991.
The bars represent the team’s attendance in a given year, and the red dot above them represents the stadium’s capacity. The green line divides the chart in two: the three years before the move to the new stadium, and the three years after.
This trend was fairly typical throughout the 1990s. The Sox’s farewell season in the old Comiskey Park brought in plenty of fans out of sentiment. Then the new stadium was built. Attendance spiked in the park’s first year and leveled off slightly in the next two. Clearly a good financial move, given the prosperity of the decade to come.
Moving forward a few years, the Baltimore Orioles’ Camden Yards:
After 1991, the Orioles moved from what was arguably baseball’s least exciting stadium (Memorial Stadium) to perhaps its most exciting (Camden Yards). An interesting trend: stadium capacity goes down, attendance goes up.
The Atlanta Braves were one of many teams to jock the Orioles’ style and build a fake-retro ballpark:
This graph, I think, carries no small amount of relevance to the present situations of the Yankees and Mets. The economy was booming in the mid-to-late 90s, but after baseball’s strike hit in 1994, it may as well have been a recession. Think about this: the Braves won a World Series in 1995, but attendance dropped sharply. And as defending champions in 1996, their attendance barely improved. It wasn’t until their 1997 move into Turner Field that fans started coming back in full strength. Apparently, baseball fans don’t show up for the good baseball. They show up for the pretty building.
For a little while, anyway.
The 1998-2000 Pittsburgh Pirates: crappy team, crappy stadium. The 2001-03 Pirates: crappy team, nice stadium. It was nice enough to attract fans in its maiden season, but attendance soon bounced back to where it was to begin with.
Continuing in chronological order, the Cincinnati Reds:
The Reds’ quality of play on the field, I think, serves as a solid control element. Year in and year out, their record has been pretty lousy, but they kept some exciting players and had a loyal fan base. Around this time, though, our economy started to grow less stable. The recession may not have officially started yet, but the pieces were coming into place. Despite the common perception that Cinergy Field was ugly and Great American Ballpark is pretty nice, the spike in attendance here is pretty underwhelming.
And finally, we get to the St. Louis Cardinals:
Again, a little bit of an attendance jump, but nothing near as dramatic as the stadium openings of the 90s. The park will probably pay off in the long term, but doesn’t seem to be the short-term solution. Although the St. Louis market is smaller, it bears a similarity to the fan bases of the Mets and Yankees — there will be slight ups and downs, but ultimately, people will come to see the team, regardless of where it plays.
I personally tend to hold reservations against building new stadiums, ever. I’m sentimental, I don’t like waste, and I don’t like to see public financing of private enterprises. Regardless, I have to concede that it makes financial sense for the team.
I wonder, though, whether the Yankees and Mets would have built these stadiums if they knew a recession was on the way. Based upon the attendance trends of the other baseball stadiums built this decade, they probably won’t get the short-term revenue boost they could really use.
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ummmm, the orioles played at Memorial Stadium.. Municipal Stadium was Cleveland..
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Also, here's the abstract of a paper done on this topic by those pesky "actual economists" - http://jse.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/3...
"Using panel data of MLB team attendance from 1950 to 2002, we determined that the attendance "honeymoon" effect of a new stadium—after separating quality-of-play effects—increases attendance by 32% to 37% the opening year of a new stadium. Attendance remains above baseline levels for only two seasons for multipurpose stadiums built during 1960 to 1974 but for 6 to 10 seasons at newer ballparks."
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It might be more instructive to look at parks built after the turn of the century (GA, Busch, Citizens Bank Park, Natonals Park, etc.) to get a more up to date view.
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