Will fans pay major league prices to watch minor league level baseball?
That is the question facing the Houston Astros as they stumble though the worst stretch in franchise history, in which they have lost more than 100 games in the last two years and are on track to surpass that plateau again this year. As of May 2, they are on pace to lose 117 games, which would be the third most in the modern era.
This is one of the worst teams in the last 100 years, so why does owner Jim Crane insist on charging top dollar for broadcasting rights and tickets?
While selling out Minute Maid Park looks impressive, game attendance revenue pales in comparison to broadcasting dollars. Team-owned regional sports networks are the cash cows that have driven the growth of MLB over the last decade, with contracts regularly reaching billions of dollars.
The Astros jumped onto the RNS bandwagon this year, ditching Fox Southwest for the newly-formed Comcast Sports Network, providing exclusive coverage of the worst team in baseball to Texas and surrounding states to all Comcast members.
Instead of negotiating a standard deal with their competitors in the area, Crane and Comcast want CSN to be part of every provider’s basic package of channels, something few teams can claim.
This disagreement has turned into an eight-month long holdout that cost baseball fans the first month of the season, and basketball fans much more. The Houston Rockets, who are also exclusively shown on CSN, lost an entire regular season worth of coverage to this fiasco.
While fans outside of Houston seem to be out of luck, Houstonians can still experience all of the misery of being an Astros fan the old fashioned way. But thanks to a system called dynamic pricing, visiting Minute Maid will cost as much as three times more from one series to the next.
Dynamic pricing argues that adjusting single game ticket prices based on division standings, rivalries and star players, will better represent the real value of tickets. In the real world, that means any seat against the Boston Red Sox will run you three times as much as one against the Colorado Rockies.
The fluctuating ticket prices only further shrink the average Astros’ attendance, as most Houston fans do not want to watch a blowout and opposing fans would rather stay home than pay an arm and a leg to make a trip to the factory of sadness that is Minute Maid Park.
The Astros are currently ahead of five teams in attendance, including the AL West-leading Kansas City Royals. The fans are not giving up on them, despite the ownership’s best efforts to alienate them.
We will see how long that lasts.
