Link to WaPo article by Jesse Daugherty:
The cost of building a new MLB team? Sometimes, it’s the fans who loved the old one.Daugherty collected thoughts of fans at spring training and some staffers on the stage of the rebuild and its impact on fans' willingness to shell out for tickets. Some of the fans said that, if they are in a rebuild, they ought to promote harder with giveaways and the like. Jesse D also tries to speculate about what the SPH base is, but he makes the mistake of just looking at the lowest single attendance game (mistake because SPH have trading rights and will trade out of cruddy weeknight games in April to get more tickets for the more popular games). He gets staff to identify sort of the Mendoza line for attendance, which is 2 million paid. The staffer suggests that there's serious damage if the team falls below that. They were within 27,000 of that level last year, and I can't conceive of how they don't drop lower this year.
One morning in early March, Scott Ableman, two friends and two others, all die-hard Washington Nationals fans, sat on bleachers by a backfield at the team’s spring training facility, talking about the past and present. They had watched drills start and finish. They were waiting around to see minor leaguers play. So to kill time, they debated whether 2023 promised to be like the Nationals’ 2010, when the club improved by 10 wins — a seismic jump in those days — and showed a sign or two of life.
...
“In a lot of ways, we agreed 2010 is a good comparison for right now just because it feels like they are working toward something but not exactly close to it yet. But 2010 had Ryan Zimmerman. It had Liván Hernández leading the staff. It had Stephen Strasburg on the way.”
Discusses the rebuild and fans waiting through it, and how that impacts revenues.
“I’ve gone down from 20 games to 15 to 10 just because I don’t think the product is worth it and it’s not an enjoyable experience right now,” said Jesse Roach, who has had partial season tickets since 2017 and used to attend almost every home game. “They are not operating as if they are a very bad team, because very bad teams have cooler promotions, they do more to engage the fans, they do quirky things. They are charging as if they are a team that just won the World Series, and they are not that at all.”
As the team’s record worsened in recent years, the price of many seats steadily increased, though the cost of most season plans did stay the same from 2022 to 2023. Still, a “significant number” of season plan holders did not renew, according to two people familiar with the situation, and attendance is expected to dip considerably. A team spokeswoman declined to provide year-to-year specifics for season plan holders. But full season plan holders are counted in the paid attendance of every game, and Washington’s lowest attendance of 2022 was 9,261 for the first leg of a doubleheader in mid-April.
Discusses also the bargains they have been offering for Opening day, noting that, as of a few weeks ago, you could get blocks of 6 seats in 50 of the sections in the park.
