From the BusinessCourier:
The team’s season ticket base – the lifeblood of any Major League Baseball team – is just more than 11,000, Reds COO Phil Castellini told a crowd at the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce’s Eggs ’n Issues meeting Tuesday morning.
Castellini wasn’t complaining. The team has boosted that figure from less than 8,000 a few years ago. But it pales in comparison to the St. Louis Cardinals’ total of about 25,000.
“That gives them a head start of 14,000 fans every game,†Castellini said. “We’re still greatly affected by the weather and the opponent.â€Â
The article says that the team gets about 1/2 of its revenue from league-wide revenue sharing and that increasing attendance is their biggest opportunity for increasing revenue. It says the team’s goal is to get that season ticket number back up to the 16,000 – 18,000 that it was during the BRM era.
But there is no discussion of the impact of televising nearly every game and the stronger, cheaper baseball competition in the area (the growth of the popularity of minor league baseball and having teams in the region such as Louisville, Indianapolis, Columbus, Dayton, Lexington) that either didn’t exist, or was not nearly as popular, in those days.
I’d like to see the local tv revenue numbers and see how much they amount to on a per game basis. I’m not saying that deleting games from the tv schedule would increase attendance, I don’t know; but I’m constantly amazed in these types of article that it is never even mentioned.