Braves start title quest as MLB’s best and most in-demand team
THERE IS LITTLE QUESTION that MLB’s most in-demand team is the Atlanta Braves. But the organization is not using its ever-growing waitlist for season tickets, record-setting attendance figures and spike in TV viewership as a prompt to stop taking big swings.
Quite the contrary.
“We’re in a fantastic place,” Braves President Derek Schiller said, “but we’re not going to rest on our laurels.”
The latest example came last week at Truist Park, when the Braves looked to maximize the five straight off days before their playoff opener — a byproduct of the expanded playoff format introduced last year — by opening up their venue to fans for postseason workouts. Fans needed to register at the team’s website to attend and were limited to just one of the three workout days. The free tickets gave them early access to new postseason apparel at the Braves’ team shops and select concessions around the ballpark.
Nearly 10,000 tickets were claimed for each of the three events, which were the first of their kind for the Braves and came ahead of the team’s NLDS matchup against the Phillies. The Dodgers and Orioles even followed Atlanta’s lead by hosting pre-playoff workouts of their own ahead of their division series matchups.
Adam Zimmerman, the Braves’ senior vice president of marketing and content, said “the energy, activity and atmosphere have been incredible” at the free events, but the data point that stunned him was the number of attendees — about 70% — who had not previously been to a Braves game this season. Zimmerman suspects that number can be traced back to demand for tickets outweighing supply, the cost-free experience and the chance to watch meaningful practices ahead of the playoffs, though he’s excited to dig further into the data to learn more about a potentially big opportunity they’ve unearthed.
“The idea of ‘free’ with an eye toward data collection to perhaps unlock new audiences is really intriguing for us,” he said.
Atlanta sold out its NLDS and NLCS tickets after a regular season in which the club ranked fifth in MLB with a Truist Park-record attendance of 3,191,505. After halting their season-ticket sales for the first time in franchise history — in the neighborhood of 24,000 — they’ve seen the corresponding waitlist balloon to over 10,000. Meanwhile, the Braves’ viewership on Bally Sports South increased by 19%, which ranked inside the top 10 across MLB’s U.S.-based RSNs.
It, of course, has something to do with the Braves’ MLB-best 104 regular-season wins. But Schiller said it also has a lot to do with the experience of attending a Braves game — so much so that “we don’t think there’s a direct relationship to what might happen in the 2023 postseason” and demand for the Braves, as evidenced by the renewals that have already taken place for their existing season-ticket base. Schiller called that renewal percentage “extremely strong.”
As far as other key factors, Schiller first pointed to The Battery. The Braves’ mixed-used development generated $15 million in revenue last quarter, a 13% year-over-year increase, according to an earnings report.