Baseball not affected by the economy

Before the 2009 season everyone was wondering if the bad economy would affect baseball. This affected the last off-season drastically where many players received smaller contracts in length and dollar amount. The question was answered yesterday. Baseball was not affected by this economy. People still went to the games for the fifth highest attendance ever in Major league baseball. This is shocking that is was one of the best attendances ever! It will be interesting how this affects free agency and the arguments that agent's will use with this.

4 comments:

David "MVP" Eckstein said...

Tell that to Bobby Abreu, Adam Dunn, Joe Biemel, etc.

Oh, and the Mets are cutting their ticket prices next yr bc of the economy as did the Yankees this yr.

Sounds to me like baseball was quite affected (did you account for inflation at all)??

Adam Kaplan said...

I wonder though if selling a lot of tickets equals making money. I have a sneaking suspcision that the reason clubs sold many tickets was that teams had to reduce the price of the tickets and thus thats why they were able to sell more.

I'd like to see how much profit teams made this year as opposed to past years.

I also don't think players getting less money is because of the eonomy. It could be, but I don't know that we can make that causal jump. Maybe teams (outisde the yankees and red sox) are realzing they need to be smarter with their money in general.

Journalissimo said...

This title is a bit extreme. To say that ballclubs were not affected by the economy is just a silly statement. Everyone was and is affected by the economy. Plus, what about other factors besides ticket sales? Are staffs smaller? Were benefits cut? Is merchandise sales down? Is ad revenue down?

The 'Bright' One said...

The only guy not affected by the economy is Jerry Riensdorf.

Ticket prices are not down this year. The people most affected by the economy are the people who couldnt even afford tickets before the recession. The rich are still rich and they are the ones filling the seats. The yanks had to drop ticket prices cause not even bill gates wants to spend 10K to take his family to a game