Dallas Morning News Article

Last week I was interviewed by someone from the Dallas Morning News about my attendance at baseball games. Early in 2007 I did an article about attendance and the team’s record. It included a graph, and the fellow from the DMN liked this, hence how we got to talking. The interview ended up with me generally griping that it’s too bloody expensive to go to a ton of games, unless you’re part of what a friend of mine calls “the boob job and cocaine crowd”.

This article is out in today’s Dallas Morning News paper, and is actually the lead story on the front page of the newspaper. The angle of the piece is “Why is attendance so bad?” I had a lot more to say in the interview than what was used, but that’s fine – I know how newspaper interviews go. You say about 200 times more than what is actually used. They seemed to like my quote about “It costs $28 before you even buy your ticket”. I did have a lot more to say about several other things to the DMN guy. The rest of this article is pretty much what I talked about.

I also had a lot to say about the 7PM start times. I hate them. Given that the article does say I live 33 miles from the ballpark, you have to consider my route to the Ballpark. I get done with work at 6PM, and for me to leave work at 6, drive through that nightmare that is rush hour traffic downtown, get out to the ballpark, park my car, walk to the stadium, get through to my seat, and IF I AM LUCKY I will be in my seat for first pitch. One other thing I said in the article that I was hopeful would make it in was that given how expensive these games are to attend, I want to see the whole darn thing. The 7PM start times make that near impossible for me, and I don’t want to run around like a chicken with my head cut off just to MAYBE make it there in time. If I can’t see the whole game, the heck with it, I’m staying home.

This is hindered by one major change in 2008. Parking. The team has screwed up the cash parking really good. Given that I used to go to so many games for over a decade, I knew all the good parking tricks.

That is the 2008 Parking map. The dirty little secret was that you used to be able to park with cash parking lot A. This was the best place to park, provided you got to the game about an hour ahead of time. If you got there too close, it would have been filled up, and you’d get stuck. But Lot A was the way to go for cash parking. Not anymore, it’s been replaced with all voucher parking (meaning the common guy is blocked). In 2007, they did add a new lot, it is “Lot M”. That actually wasn’t too bad in terms of walking. I didn’t mind that so much. Not as close as “Lot A”, mind you, but not too bad. But in a brilliant maneuver, AFTER JUST ONE YEAR OF USE, it was deemed too nice of a lot, and also taken away from cash parking (per the map I’m showing here). That leaves cash parking all the way out behind the darned Siemens building. ANother really stupid move – take away parking for an OFFICE BUILDING. Brilliant maneuver. There is “Lot H”, which is not all that bad in terms of walk to the park. It’s a bit longer than I’d prefer, but it’s hell of a lot better than the N, I, or G lots. Forget the H & F lots – I will never park there. Just ain’t happening. I don’t want to have to park, and THEN TAKE A BUS. Anyway, “Lot H”, isn’t so bad, but the problem is getting out. You’re essentially trapped there, and when I parked there opening day it took A FRIGGIN HOUR AND A HALF just to get to Route 30. It’s not so bad now that the season has started, but you have to leave the ballpark THE SECOND the game is over to make that a viable exit. If you don’t (meaning use the bathroom, visit the gift shop), it will then take you 45 minutes to an hour to get to Rt 30, because all the other cards have clogged the roads in front of you. So yeah, Parking was SERIOUSLY screwed up in 2008, and that too has contributed to my not enjoying going out there anymore. It also contributes to the feeling that there’s nothing to do out by the ballpark. There really isn’t, but when you feel you have to get in your car immediately to keep yourself from spending the better part of an hour just getting to the highway, you don’t WANT to stay there. You want to get out as fast as possible.

The biggest thing I seem to think that baseball teams have in their mindset is that they view the price of the ticket as the ultimate cost to attending a game. It is not. Not even close. The Rangers are right though in that the majority of their tickets are moderately priced. With all the deals and packages out there, it’s not that hard to get a decently priced ticket. But understand this, Mr. Hicks/Nolan Ryan/Chuck Morgan/this year’s guy who is supposed to increase ticket sales… THE COST OF TICKETS IS NOT THE PROBLEM – It’s all the other bloody costs associated with the the entire Major League Baseball experience. As the article pointed out, it costs $28 for me to just get to the park. You buy the cheapest decent seat to sit behind home plate up top, and it costs $16. That makes it $44 for one game, and that’s assuming you go by yourself, and don’t buy anything at the park. Here’s a list of costs..

• Ticket – $15.00 (in upper deck behind home plate, or $19 for things like Yankees/Red Sox) – but this is a wildly variable number. $15 is the low end of the spectrum. Yes, I know there are $6 seats, but nobody REALLY wishes to sit there, you sit there out of cost only)
• Gas – $16.00 (for me, I know this varies for people, but it’s a real cost now)
• Parking – $12.00
• Large Soda – $5.50
• Hot Dog – $4.50
• Beer – $6.50 (could be $6.25 or $6.75, I forget which right this minute)
• Program – $5 (although it can be $3 if you use the coupon on your parking stub)
• Fitted Baseball Cap – $32.50 (yeah, there are cheaper ones, but the quality is nowhere as good)

That’s just one of each of these things. Bring more people, and that cost rises exponentially. I know the “All You can Eat Seats” are an attempt to address the food cost issue, and that is a good deal, but for those of us who are already of uh, “portly build”, it’s actually embarrassing. “Oh look, the fat guy is in the All you can eat seats – I wonder how many hot dogs and nachos he’ll pound down?” So no, I don’t use this option. I also know you don’t buy a cap every time you go, but one thing that gets talked about a lot when cost of baseball games are brought up is the “family experience”. If you bring a couple of kids, and you can only go once or twice a year, then yeah, “stuff to buy” is a viable cost, too.

So yeah, with gas at $4 a gallon, and milk at roughly the same price, with everything else going up because of rising fuel costs, the $5 Racetrack gas gard is a nice idea, but it’s like spitting in a swimming pool. It disappears immediately, and doesn’t have any true lasting impact. To cover my gas going to one game, there would have to be four people coming out, and that’s a lot of extra cost.

Yeah, I’m a bit angry about all of this. Because I now feel both priced out of the game, and squeezed out due to the mess that parking has become. Don’t get me wrong, when I’m out there, and actually in my seat, I still love going to MLB games. But all the crap that surrounds getting me to my seat makes it impossible to enjoy it as much as I used to.

What would solve this for me? High Speed rail to the ballpark. I was hoping that when Jerrylandâ„¢ moved in next door, we might get some sort of light rail option out to the area. No such luck. When I grew up in Philly, I averaged a TON of games – on the order of 30 or so a year. The reason was cost. With a GOOD mass transit system, all you had to do was get on ANY bus in the entire system, and somewhere they would connect to either the Subway or the High Speed elevated train. The El would connect to the Subway, and you took the Subway in Philly to the end of the line. Get off the subway, and you were RIGHT THERE. No parking, no gas, no fuss. At my peak, I went to 45 games a year – almost all of them on mass transit. That would knock out a massive cost of attendance, and would allow me to go to more games. Yes. Guaranteed – put in light rail, and my attendance would go way the heck back up. But noooo. The City of Arlington had to get all pissy about paying for Dart, so there’s no option there at all.

The article talks about my “church commitment”. For the record, my church is building a new building, and we’re currently in the “raising funds” part of that procedure. I went and took the cost list above and averaged it out via my personal spending habits at Rangers games, and worked it to be roughly $50 a game. I multiplied that by the number of games per year, and decided I’d rather give that money to Jesus Christ and the church than to Tom Hicks and the Texas Rangers. Its’ going to serve a far better purpose bringing people to Jesus, than bringing people to the Ballpark. While I’m enough of a baseball fan that I can’t go completely cold turkey and not go to any, my average of about 20-25 games has dropped to a projected attendance of six this year. I have just two more games I plan on going to this year. For the 2008, 2009, & 2010 seasons, my “Texas Rangers” money is going to my church so we can build a new facility. We’re an Anglican church, and if you’re in the Garland/Mesquite/Rowlett area, come visit us, we’d love to have you.

To sum up, yes I am donating a huge amount of money from what used to be my Texas Rangers “budget to my church. But even if I was not, I still would have not attended as many games due to all the other problems I’ve detailed above. Major League Baseball is always saying how “good” things are, and how much money the overall sport is making. Of course it is, they’re making it on the backs of the peons who love the game, and are being totally squeezed out due to mostly cost. I know I am.

UPDATE: There was a photographer out at my office on Friday from the Dallas Morning News and took some pictures of me. That did not get used in the article, but I was able to get a copy of the picture that was submitted for the article. Had it been used, this picture would have been in the article: