Phillies’ offseason comes at a cost
Uninspiring offseason has Phillies selling $5 tickets for April and May
PHILADELPHIA » Just over a year ago, John Middleton scribbled his autograph on a contract that would guarantee Bryce Harper $330,000,000. Among his reasons, and they were plentiful, one would come with no guarantee at all. There would be no assurance that Philadelphia would immediately become the baseball town it was a decade earlier.
That term is vague, of course. What is a baseball town, really? But there was one story bumping around this week that gave rise to the thought that even spending money on a player with the skill, relative youth and sense of community obligation to be most popular in the franchise’s inconsistent history will not be a miracle fan-interest salve.
How else to explain why the Phillies have chosen to open their gates into May and basically charge the same admission fee as any Friday night high school football game: Five bucks, please.
Hey, 66,000,000 fans later, and Middleton will break even on his Harper investment.
All right, that is fake math. The ticket package requires
fans to pay up-front for all of the April games, and will provide only standing-room access (with the wink-wink approval to fill in some of the unoccupied cheaper seats). And the calculation doesn’t include the money the Phillies will receive from luxury-box investors and lower-level single-seat customers and TV and advertising and beer sales and souvenirs.
But what is real is that the Phillies have decided that the best way to people their higher upper decks in the spring is to make the experience cheaper than an hour at any karaoke night. So how, in one year, did baseball interest in Philadelphia reach the point where effectively giving away tickets should be considered a reasonable business model? Wasn’t it just last April that they enjoyed 10 April crowds of 35,000 or more? And didn’t they increase their attendance by 26 percent in Harper’s first season, the most substantial increase in baseball?
The theories are plentiful. Even with Harper, the 2019 Phillies were only 8181. That was compounded by the annoyance that the Nationals, Harper’s former team, won the whole thing anyway. There was Gabe Kapler fatigue, the customers weary of being treated by a manager like they knew nothing about the sport. There was a famously bizarre postseason press conference at which the general manager admitted he was not in favor of firing Kapler, all while Middleton was going on
a lengthy rant about how he was the CEO and he would do as he pleased. There was a lack of public buy-in that the Phillies would contend in 2020, with Las Vegas providing a haunting echo by listing the over-under for wins at around 86. There were shifts and launchangles and encouraged swings-and-misses that made baseball less appealing. There was the reality that in 2017 the World Series champions used illegal technology to cheat. It all added up.
But more than anything, and that includes the archaic concept of moving the whole operation seven states south for two months, the Phillies lost their public-perception momentum by miscalculating how modern pro sports works. And how it works is that the teams that make the most dizzying offseason splashes will enjoy more walkup fan interest. The NFL and NBA help to ensure that through their drafts, which are basically reality TV shows in which every team is guaranteed in one night to have better players than it did that morning. For baseball, the hot-stove league long has been a reliable generator to keep fans engaged while they are not consumed by backup longsnappers. So what did the Phillies do in the offseason that would make any fan race to the sporting goods store and overpay for the latest replica jersey? They bought the Mets’ third best pitcher and they committed to a one-year rental of a 29-year-old shortstop who hasn’t played more than 136 games in a season since 2017. Both Zack
Wheeler and Didi Gregorius will be upgrades. But would either be recognizable enough at a coffee shop to inspire an impromptu selfie line?
Eventually, Joe Girardi will be popular. His performance at the Philadelphia Sports Writers dinner, where he made sure to recognize every honoree at the head table by name and accomplishment, already has been recognized as legendary. Forget not, though, an everenduring sports truth: No one pays to watch some guy change pitchers. If Girardi wins, and he should, that will fill some remote parking lots. But no matter how good he is in public, or how accomplished he has been as a manager, it was not going to match the excitement that Middleton would have created had he gone into his stash for another $330,000,000 for Gerrit Cole. Yet rather than paying a luxury tax on salaries to generate buzz, the Phillies turned their box office into a fiveand-below outlet.
They are right to feel they’ve improved enough that, by the summer, they will be in contention and baseball interest will again be robust in Philadelphia. They will be better managed, better coached and still have Harper and J.T. Realmuto and Aaron Nola. If it all works, five bucks won’t even cover the service fee for a three-figure ticket purchase. But until then, enjoy the early-bird specials.