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Baseball Financials: FancostBy Patrick Mondout
Fancost is a figure used to represent how much it costs fans to
have a typical night out at the ballpark. You can see team-by-team figures
for each season from 1991 forward by clicking on a year in the table on
the right:
Teammarketing.com
has developed what they call the Fan Cost Index to track the cost of
attending an event (such as a baseball game) for a family of four. We
include their calculation for each team going back to the 1991 season. To
fully understand the calculation, you should visit their
site.
The 2005 Boston Red Sox hold the all-time record for the most expensive
fancost in baseball at $276.41 (and it wasn't even close - more than $100
over average according to the table on the right). For that amount a
family of four in Boston could expect two adult averaged-priced tickets
and two children's admissions, four small soft drinks, two small beers,
four hot dogs, parking, and two adult-sized caps (to represent souvenir
sales). Our they could pay their mortgage!
The fancost data used here was compiled by Rodney Fort from
Teammarketing.com. Fort is a professor of economics at Washington State
University who has a passion for the economics of sports. He has an excellent
site full of data related to the economics of sports.
On our yearly team pages (1996
Baltimore Orioles or 1929
New York Yankees, for example) we also include a second fancost number
which is simply the first number multiplied by 81. This is meant to give
some idea how much it might cost a family of four to go to a full season's
worth of games, but it is understood that the figure is misleading. Season
tickets sell at a discount to individual tickets (as used in the
calculation above) and it seems unlikely that a family of four would spend
$15 per game for hats (that is the figure for the 2005
Red Sox).
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Share Your Memories!
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Our sites have always been by you and about you. If
you check
our TV Forums or our Technology & Science forums, you'll find literally thousands of messages from fans
of 1970s TV shows, survivors of hurricanes or aircraft accidents, etc. from all over the world sharing their memories, asking
questions, making comments. Our baseball section is new, but don't let
that stop you from sharing
your memories of the first game you went to, your favorite player, a
now-forgotten stadium, etc. Of course you can also ask questions, post
trivia, tell the world what you think of Barry Bonds, or just read what
others are saying.
--Patrick Mondout
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| | Can you guess which stadium this is from the picture? Click here for the answer. | | |
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MLB Financials by Year(180).jpg)
