The Boston Red Sox should be a hot ticket at Rogers Centre. In the past, buses from Beantown would line the streets, their passengers mixing among the pumped-up Torontonians, some of whom would pay almost anything to see the Blue Jays square off against their American League East rivals.
But not last Wednesday.
"Tickets cheaper than the box office!" a scalper yelled.
There has been much soul-searching over the Jays' viability, especially after a former player questioned the city's commitment to the sport. Ex-Jay Alex Rios, booed in each at-bat during the four-game series with the Chicago White Sox last month, told a Chicago paper: "There's no real following here. There's a small group of diehards, but it's hockey, hockey, hockey. It's gotten sad here. They just don't really care."
Certainly, fan attitudes waver between listless and angry, not least because the deals end at the gate. Ever-climbing, the price of hot dogs and merchandise have an inverse relationship to the Jays' plummeting fortunes. Then there is the quality of the food: If Goldman Sachs had a kitchen at the place, this is what the hamburgers would taste like.
No wonder that attendance has plummeted from three consecutive seasons of 4-million paying fans in the early nineties as the Jays won back-to-back championships to 1.876-million last year.
The wisdom is that fans would return if the team rediscovered those winning ways of the nineties. "Nothing hurts your brand like having an empty building and not performing well over a long period of time," says David Carter, executive director of the Sports Business Institute at the University of Southern California, Marshall.
But the Jays' record is not the only thing that makes the team a tougher sell than two decades ago. The city has also transformed. Congestion and difficult parking take the fun out of what could be a whimsical day at the ballpark. A demographic shift to visible minorities makes soccer, and the Toronto FC, the city's new alluring sport.
Yet team executives don't seem to be countering these challenges. Management says they won't discount ticket prices. Doing so would devalue the brand, CEO Paul Beeston has insisted. As though cribbing a response from the Maple Leafs or Raptors playbook, he has also said that this is going to be a rebuilding year for the team, which has only once finished above third place in their division since 1993. (Blue Jays management declined interview requests for this article.)
If fans aren't going to get a winning team, just what do they get for their money other than the chance to stare at the roof of the not so retractable dome?
According to the Fan Cost Index, an annual survey produced by the sports research publisher Team Marketing Report, it costs a family of four an average of $208.21 to see a Jays game this year, making the Jays the 12th most expensive team on the 30-team index. (All figures here are in U.S. dollars).
Compare the cost to what fans in Los Angeles, a similarly large, multicultural city, shell out for a Dodgers game: they spend $221.64. Though that number is slightly more than the Jays, you could argue that their fans enjoy a few more prizes in their proverbial crackerjacks.
The Dodgers have a salary payroll of more than $95-million, compared to the Jays' $61.4-million. In baseball, the more money a team spends, the more likely it is to win. Dodgers fans cheer on a team that has made the playoffs in six of the last eight seasons. The omnipotent New York Yankees shelled out $201-million last year, once again dwarfing its competitors and lifting it to a World Series title.
When the Blue Jays last tasted World Series success, their $45-million payroll was tops in the league. The average ticket price then was $13.73; today it's $23.84. A hot dog back in the winning years ran $1.70; today it's $5. A soft drink in 1993 cost $1.60; today it'll run you $4.29; all increases that are two or three times the rate of inflation.
And with the population of the GTA at 5.5-million, the drive to Rogers Centre has become even more frustrating as more cars are on the road. It's also a much more expensive drive for Southern Ontarian fans with premium gasoline going for $1.13 a litre compared to roughly 58 cents in April of 1993.
As well, the shifting demographics of Toronto make it that much harder for the Jays to attract a younger fan base. According to the 2006 census, almost half of the city's population is foreign-born. Many of those first-generation Torontonians don't come from countries with big baseball cultures, and many certainly don't see themselves reflected in the Jays' roster.
While the baseball team might have borrowed the "rebuilding" phrase from Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, it could also learn a little from MLSE about reaching out to a new crowd. For instance, when the Raptors signed Andrea Bargnani in 2006, the team wasn't just getting a No. 1 pick; they were also appealing to Toronto's large Italian community. Same with Hedo Turkoglu. The city's Turkish community went wild when he was signed and created a cheering section for him. For a while, at least.
But while Mr. Beeston's refusal to discount tickets may infuriate some fans, industry analysts say it is wise to hold one's ground. Lowering prices may work in the short term, but it makes it much harder to increase the price down the road.
Instead, the Blue Jays are taking less dramatic steps to engage fans. This week, the team launched Tweeting Tuesday as a way to let Twitter users interact with the team.
"The No. 1 that a lot of folks are asking for in terms of season tickets in general and just their overall ballpark experience is access. That's the one thing that obviously cannot be replicated on television," says Eric Fisher, a baseball writer at the U.S.-based Sports Business Journal.
The Twitter approach won't sway all the fans. For Martin Starr, a 79-year-old season ticket holder and not a member of the twitterati, price is the key. If the team wants to build a large fan base it must attract families, he says. And to do that, it must provide a better value for the price of admission.
"They've got to get the young kids in," he says. To do that, the team should create packages that bundle tickets with coupons for free hot dogs or popcorn, he suggests.
They might also try adding a few new concession items to appeal to the tastes of Toronto in 2010, a city with a penchant for world cuisine.
Offering a vinyl-tasting hot dog or shoving down some over-salted fries might not reflect where the city has gone since the Jays' first season in 1977.
The Toronto FC were smart enough to appeal to the city's diversity with its menu, offering chicken roti, Jamaican patties and Portuguese cornbread sandwiches at BMO Field, among other worldly delights.
For now, though, the empty blue seats are being seen as a temporary setback by management.
"Our ticket prices, I think, are fair value for seeing the best baseball players in the world," Mr. Beeston said in a prior interview with The Globe and Mail.
Getting fans out to the ballpark isn't a matter of dangling deals; it's a matter of winning games, he added.
"If we can play entertaining baseball, you'll see what the change is going to be."
Dave McGinn