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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
If baseball's exemption were lifted, real fans might be able to afford tickets, and teams would stop holding cities hostage. Call your congressman.
May 19, 2000 | To be a sports fan these days is to be taking a course in economics: Salary caps, arbitration, revenue sharing and large market are terms probably as well known as hit-and-run and full-court press to sports fans who grew up in the '80s. It's gratifying to see that the sports press is catching up on these things, too. Two recent articles are particularly gratifying. The May 15 issue of Sports Illustrated includes a superb feature by E.M. Swift on the effect that corporations are having on ticket prices, and the May 15 issue of the New Yorker has a piece by James Surowiecki on a possible solution to the problem.
Actually, Surowiecki's piece is about baseball's antitrust exemption and how its removal would benefit fans. This is not a new idea; Marvin Miller, former chief economist for the steelworkers union and the first executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, proposed the idea some time ago. In a greatly oversimplified version it was like this: The New York Yankees, or rather, their owner, George Steinbrenner, can hold the city of New York hostage in demand for a new stadium built with public money by threatening to move the Yankees elsewhere.
Miller's and Surowiecki's theory -- and again, I'm oversimplifying -- is that if Major League Baseball's exemption from the antitrust laws were completely repealed, what or who would stop, say, the Oakland A's or Minnesota Twins (or some other disgruntled so-called small-market team) from saying, "Hey, an old stadium without luxury boxes in New York is fine with us, we'll be arriving on the next plane"?
And the answer to that question is: Nothing, and certainly not the commissioner's office, could prevent such a thing from happening -- and that's not oversimplified. Miller's wrinkle was to suggest that absence of the antitrust exemption could only bring about something else that might, in the long run, be more beneficial. What, he suggested, would prevent, say, a new Triple-A minor league franchise from moving into New York, and perhaps another in Brooklyn, and maybe one in Newark, and how about Washington, which has been without big league ball for almost 30 years? And what would prevent them from eventually developing into a competing major league? And, again, the answer to these questions is: If you remove baseball's exemption from antitrust laws, nothing at all could prevent these things from happening.
Swift's story in SI touches on a topic that, judging from radio call-in show traffic, is the hottest in sports right now: the cost of going to a game. I won't bore you with numbers; suffice it to say that every sport has seen a ridiculous rise in ticket prices over the last 10 years. There was a time not too long ago when we could legitimately say that ticket prices shouldn't concern us, that it was simply a case of supply and demand and that if people didn't like the product or didn't think it was worth the price, then they would stop buying and the price would come back down. But with corporations buying up more and more tickets, especially to professional football and basketball games, there are fewer tickets available to average (i.e. "real") fans, and the ones that are available are priced out of the range of working people.
What I'm suggesting is that the removal of all antitrust laws for all professional sports could go a long way toward bringing ticket prices down, as well as saving cities hundreds of millions of dollars on new stadiums. More professional teams, even minor league teams, means more competition for the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball, and, inevitably, less meat in the corporate-owned seats of big-time professional sports. And that will lower tickets prices faster than the drop in the NBA's Nielsen ratings.
If you're a fan, you're by definition a victim. But that doesn't mean you have to be helpless. You've got a phone, you've got e-mail, you've got stamps and you've got a congressman.
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