Is baseball's brand strength enough to avert demise?

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© St. Petersburg Times
published August 30, 2002

Soon ... only ball players will afford ball games.

-- Sign protesting possible baseball strike held up by fan Bob Skolmowski at Aug. 18 Tampa Bay Devil Rays game at Tropicana Field.

Fans will not desert baseball however long a strike lasts.

-- Richard Feinberg, director of Purdue University's Center for Customer Driven Quality.

Sports writers never skipped an opportunity this summer to report on the threatened strike by Major League Baseball players. But, in truth, the real story belongs just as much to the business sections of newspapers.

Rich corporate owners. Unions of millionaire players. Irate customers (fans). Worried advertisers. Strike deadlines. Monopolies. Greed. Hey, what part of this is not basic business fodder?

Strike or no strike, the business of baseball is a disaster.

Sooner or later, Major League Baseball must fix itself. It must follow the leads of the National Football League and other pro sports that each season manage to offer fans a decent field of competitive teams. Baseball, on the other hand, tends to stick us over and over (with occasional exception) with postseason replays of the New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves.

The frustration of fans is palpable. Twelve days ago, Bob Skolmowski of Indian Rocks Beach was among the fans holding signs protesting baseball's labor dispute and high ticket prices at the last home game of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. In Minnesota, Jacob Bunge went to a Twins game this month hooded in black and carrying a tombstone-shaped "R.I.P. Baseball in America" sign.

Tampa Bay fans are bummed out because the last-place Devil Rays remain a lousy product. They see the on-field success of the Arizona Diamondbacks (last year's World Series winners, and currently first place in their division), and wonder how a team based in Phoenix and started in the same year as the Devil Rays could be so many light-years ahead.

Many business experts warn that baseball, by its inability to reform, is slitting its own throat:

-- Advertisers are growing tired of spending money on a sport that routinely alienates fans with threats of strikes. Marketers winced when July's all-star game registered its lowest-ever ratings (14.7-million people vs. 22-million who watched the game in 1994).

-- Estimates by the U.S. Conference of Mayors suggest that a players strike would cost baseball cities and area businesses an average $1.4-million a game.

-- A family of four now spends an average of $145 to go to a Major League game, according to Team Marketing Report, a sports industry newsletter. (In June, I spent $100 for three tickets in distant right field at Boston's Fenway Park -- never mind the concessions.)

-- Major League Baseball suffered a significant decrease in fan loyalty during the last four years, says the sixth annual sports loyalty index survey by Brand Keys, released last month.

Without dramatic changes, it sure feels like this all adds up to a slow death for Major League Baseball.

Some folks disagree. At Indiana's Purdue University, retailing professor Richard Feinberg argues that baseball happens to belong to an elite set of consumer goods (including Harley-Davidson motorcycles) he calls sacred products.

"Baseball is so strongly branded and ingrained on the American psyche that no matter how divisive the players or owners, no matter how disrespectful they are to fans, the fans will always come," says Feinberg, a lifelong New York Mets fan who is director of Purdue's Center for Customer-Driven Quality. (He obviously has not visited Tropicana Field this summer.)

It seems schmaltzy, but Feinberg sounds a lot like the reclusive '60s writer Terence Mann, the baseball-loving character played by actor James Earl Jones in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams. Feinberg even quotes Mann's now-famous lines in the movie to make his point about the long-term resiliency of baseball fans.

"This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come."

Fans, Feinberg says, may be angry about prices and greedy players and unfair teams. Fans may say that they will never return. But they will come back, he says, because baseball is a special form of sacred consumption.

Now there's a believer. Sure hope he's right.

Short takes

ENRON'S SPREADING INFLUENCE?: Tomato Cards, a line put out by Recycled Paper Greetings, now makes a birthday card inspired by Enron's scandals. One card features a smirking accountant at an adding machine. "For your birthday, we hired Enron's accountants to figure out just how old you are," it reads. "Their recommendation is to divide by half and carry forward the balance. Happy Birthday. (Please shred this card after reading.)"

OLD BEATS NEW: Sarasota's Uniroyal Technology, which sought bankruptcy protection this week, still says its future lies with its LED manufacturing plant in Tampa. But it is the company's old-style subsidiary in Wisconsin, a maker of Naugahyde-covered fabric for seating, that's growing. The unit added 40 people in the past year and is the only part of the company with the bankruptcy court's blessing to continue paying its customers in full.

WHO'S CORRUPT?: The good news? The United States ranked 16th among 102 countries in a new ranking of corruption in politicians and businesses. The bad news? Fifteen other countries are viewed as less corrupt. Finland ranked first (least corrupt), while Bangladesh ranked most corrupt at No. 102, says Transparency International, a Berlin organization that tracks accountability. Score one more hit by Enron. . . .

-- Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8405.

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