Dealing On The Baseball Diamond

With the 2008 baseball trading deadline expiring on Thursday, a few All-Stars have already called in the moving vans. Former Cleveland pitcher C.C. Sabathia and former Atlanta first baseman Mark Teixeira are two big prizes that have already been shipped off to Milwaukee and Los Angeles respectively.

As teams with playoff dreams jockey to snag a big name and stumbling squads try to unload big contracts and start building for next year, it's easy to forget about the people who pay the players' salaries. No, not the owners, but the fans, whose ticket, concession and merchandise purchases help fuel franchise payrolls. So how do the fans react when the best players in the league switch addresses?

The arrival of a new player, especially a star player, can cause an instant bump in ticket and merchandise sales. Sabathia's first start for his new team, the Milwaukee Brewers, was a rare Tuesday night sell-out of 42,500 seats. Normally the team draws about 34,000 on a Tuesday night, so in his first start alone, including estimated money spent on tickets, parking and concessions, Sabathia brought in an additional $238,000 in revenue, according to Brewers officials. In the first 48 hours after Sabathia's trade the team sold 40,000 tickets for the rest of the season. Normally in that time period the sales would be about 6,000 tickets.

The news that an All-Star coming to town draws in fans isn't revolutionary. But what about the team on the less glamorous end of a big name player swap? Martin Gandy of TalkingChop.com, an Atlanta Braves fan blog, says that losing a player like Teixeira indicates the team is no longer playing for this season, and might make him less inclined to buy tickets for now. "But I don't think it has much bearing on next year," Gandy adds. "A new season almost always gets fans (like me) excited about their team." Despite the blow of losing a 40 homerun hitter, Gandy appreciates that now's a good time to rebuild and understands this was the right move for his team to make.

This rationale implies that fans accept that most players can leave town at any time. "It doesn't bother me a whole heck of a lot," says Grant Brisbee of McCoveyChronicles.com, a San Francisco Giants fan blog. Brisbee says that rooting for players or the team is mostly indistinguishable, but ultimately he finds himself leaning more towards favoring the team. "While it'd take four or five holocaust deniers in the bullpen to make me reject the team entirely," he says, "I can turn on a single player rather quickly."

While championing the team above the player makes it less painful when a big name leaves town, what about the brand new C.C. Sabathia jersey that poor kid in Cleveland just got for his birthday? Brisbee points out that maybe there's an upside to purchasing the jersey of a player who later gets shipped off. "If the players are traded or leave to do bigger and better things, the jersey becomes even cooler and ironic about twenty years down the road."

So take heart, little Timmy still clutching your now-defunct Mark Teixeira Atlanta Braves jersey. Vindication awaits you just two short decades away.

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