Saturday, February 12, 2000
Reds expect windfall from Junior
More attendance, more revenue
BY JOHN J. BYCZKOWSKI
The Cincinnati Enquirer
First, there's Sarasota. That's where the Cincinnati Reds will get their first glimpse of the impact Ken Griffey Jr. will have on ticket sales — when fans arrive at the team's spring training site this month to see the center fielder in a Reds uniform.
Reds Chief Operating Officer John Allen said Friday the team will need more of everything in Florida: more ticket sellers and takers, more ushers, more concessionaires.
And that's but a practice run for what the team can expect during the regular season. One “modest” estimate says the Reds can expect an additional $5.5 million in revenue when Mr. Griffey begins to put fannies in seats.
“You can modestly predict the Ken Griffey trade will boost attendance by 5,000 per game,” said Matthew Freedman, editor of Team Marketing Report, a sports marketing newsletter based in Chicago.
With 81 home games, that's 405,000 more fans than a year ago, when the Reds drew a little more than 2 million.
Figure in a $10 average ticket price, and $4 per fan in concession sales, and the Reds could see an increase in gross revenues of $5.5 million.
“I would expect them to increase more than those numbers,” Mr. Freedman said.
The Reds are unsure what kind of financial impact the trade ultimately would have on the 131-year-old franchise.
“I'll be honest with you, we won't know that answer until we get the response of the fans,” Mr. Allen told the Associated Press.“Over the last three months, we've been hearing, "Get Junior, bring him home and we're coming out.'
“So I can't tell you what the economic impact is. It's up to the fans to determine what that is.”
The addition of Mr. Griffey
— named by Sports Business Daily last year as baseball's most marketable player — is expected to enhance every business line the Reds are in.
The best effect, said Cleveland Indians Executive Vice President Dennis Lehman, is “they're going to increase their season ticket base. What that does is it allows you to do a little better planning as far as your advance sales are concerned.”
More season tickets means a more reliable base of revenue. That that also “compresses inventory,” he said, making tickets for individual games more scarce, valuable and desireable.
Mr. Allen said he doesn't want fans to go home disappointed.
“We still have to make sure they have a pleasant visit to the stadium and want to come back,” he said. “It's not just selling tickets. If you really want them to have the true Reds experience, you want them to make sure they enjoy their trip to the ballpark after they purchase a ticket.”
But the Reds are limited on what they can do with Cinergy Field, said Cal Levy, the Reds' director of marketing.
“We can't widen the concourses to allow for easier concession access. We can't create areas where we can do interactive things. And, in fact, when the construction starts (on the new ballpark this summer) that gives us even less room.”
With more fans in the seats, everything else becomes more valuable, said the Indians' Mr. Lehman.
“You've got more fans in the ballpark, and you've got more eyes on the tube, and more listening to the ballgames; and that branches out,” he said.
Mr. Allen and Mr. Levy said they've hardly begun to think about how they'll deal with the new herd of fans they expect, or how they'll take advantage of it.
“A week ago I'd have bet my salary the trade wasn't going to happen,” said Mr. Levy.
“Even though the club was working on the deal for a long time, you couldn't operate on the assumption it was going to happen.”
The Reds' marketing department was busy even before the trade, coming off a season when the Reds won a healthy 96 games and missed the playoffs by a hair. Mr. Levy said 70 percent of the advertising signs at Cinergy Field were already sold, compared to 40 percent at this time last year.
Also, there will be more promotional giveaways this season.
“We saw a big increase in interest due to a good young team that played exciting baseball last year and caught a lot of people's interest,” Mr. Levy said. The Reds are now drawing more interest from national advertisers.
The only signs the team hasn't sold are the rotating signs on the scoreboard. Some of those signs will be removed as Cinergy is cut down by 12,000 seats to make room for construction of the new ballpark. Mr.Levy said those signs are usually sold on a multiyear basis, but he may make those available now for just a year.
The fact that the trade comes barely two weeks before spring training, however, means the Reds won't make as much money as if they'd had more time to plan.
“For this season, we're so far into the selling season that the impact on the marketing will be felt, but not as much as will be in the future,” he said. “Would the prices have been higher if we knew? Yeah, it would've been. Will they be higher in the future? Probably.”
The Reds control master advertising contracts for beer (Budweiser), hot dogs (Kahn's) and soft drinks. Coca-Cola had been the soft drink sponsor since 1991, but Pepsi bid more for this season and is the new soft drink sponsor.
Merchandise sales may also boom.
“It's going to be significant,” Mr. Allen said. “I know literally the last couple of weeks as the deal got hotter and every dot.com had the deal coming down the next day, we'd get calls from major department stores — Sears, JC Penney — is the deal coming, we want to make sure we've got plenty of Junior shirts in Reds motif in stock. The merchandise is going to be huge.”
But the Reds benefit most on the merchandise they sell directly, and their outlets are one store and the Internet. The Indians, by contrast, have 10 stores and make more from merchandise than any other franchise.
Mr. Griffey's impact will likely be felt beyond the ballpark, especially if fans come from out of town, said Rex Repass, of the travel consulting firm MarketVision Research in Blue Ash. He said visitors to Cincinnati spend an average of $125 to $150.
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