If you haven’t been paying attention, it appears that the stadiums of the near future will be shrinking in size. The Mets, Yankees, A’s, Marlins, Twins, Nationals, and Cardinals, all have designs for new facilities that are smaller in terms of total seating attendance than their prior facilities.

Here’s the breakdown:

One may ask why you would lower attendance capacity. Doesn’t that limit revenues? What the new paradigm is striving to do is limit walk-ups, increase advanced ticket sales, and artificially create a “hot ticket” entertainment option.

The A’s are already trying to bring seating capacity down in their current facility, McAfee Coliseum. Seating capacity in 2005 was 44,073 (the facility is a multi-use design shared with the NFL Raiders). The plan for ‘06 is to cover the upper-deck in tarp, and reduce the capacity to 34,179. The reason for this? “As we continue our efforts to secure a new ballpark in Oakland, we will take every measure to make the Coliseum a comfortable and fan-friendly facility,” A’s president Michael Crowley said in a press release. “Our goal is to create a more intimate ballpark atmosphere and bring our seating capacity in line to what we have proposed for our new venue.”

But, why get smaller in the first place?

In the case of the Yankees, the switch is less overall attendance, but increased suite capacity. That translates into more ballpark related revenues.

In the case of the Cardinals, A’s, Marlins, Nationals, and Twins, the facilities that they have been playing in were, or are, multi-use facilities that were designed to hold large capacity crowds for NFL games.

As far as “intimate ballpark atmosphere” goes, maybe these clubs look at the way the Red Sox have been able to use a small facility to their advantage.

The average cost for a ticket a Fenway for 2005 was $44.56, an increase of 9.3% from the year prior. The year before it was $40.77, a 5.66% increase from the year prior. And with the exception of 2003, the Red Sox have seen double-digit increases in the percentage of the average cost increase over the course of the last 10 years. The cost of an average ticket at Fenway in 1996 was $15.43. To place this in context, the Red Sox charge almost twice as much on average as the Yankees do in 2005 — $44.56 compared to $27.54 (source Team Marketing Report).

In fairness to the Red Sox, they have to do this to make up for the lower total capacity (36,298) to gain the revenues needed to compete in the highly competitive AL East.

What it does outline is that MLB clubs in smaller ballparks will be able to charge a higher premium for games, bolster long-term fan attendance by making sellouts, or near sellouts much easier to attain, and lowering maintenance costs of the facility by lowering the number of seats and patrons that the clubs need to address.

As we move further away from the cookie-cutter cement donut designs of the ’60s and the ’70s, the designs of ballparks appear to be shrinking. Don’t adjust your glasses… remember, it’s all part of the plan.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 9:52 am and is filed under Baseball Insight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.