MLB Tickets: FREE for Kids 10 & Under?

MLB Tickets: FREE for Kids 10 & Under?

Here’s Brody Brazil. So, here on this YouTube channel, I recently had a great chat with author Jane Levy, who just came out with this book titled Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It. In this video, we’re going to dive deep into one of her ideas. My first solution is, and no one knows you’re going to like this, but you know, I’m Commissioner for the People, right? um let all kids accompanied by an adult age 10 and under in for free to every Major League Baseball game. Every Major League Baseball game. How does that work from a from a from a business sense a sense and a logistics sense? Like you’re serious about this? How does it actually go? And of all my ideas, you know, some of which have been derided, you know, widely, which is okay. Um I’m trying to be provocative. Um, you know, this is the one that everybody likes the most. Um, there you you turn on any ball game with the exception of last night’s Yankee Red Sox game or any of the playoff games and there are swaths of empty seats, right? It’s not a good look, right? You know, so okay, so maybe not every game they, you know, as it is, they they hold back certain games they call premium, which it usually means when the Yankees come to town. But um there are empty seats and you know and an audience that needs to be built. A friend of mine who’s an economist um specializing in sports, particularly baseball, uh who’s a professor at the University of Wisconsin lacrosse, took Cubs menu numbers for me um in 2023. I I should have had him update them last year, but anyway, um they’re they’re not that different. It’s just gotten more expensive. Um, if you took a kid, a 10-year-old, and bought him a hot dog, small kidsiz hot dog, not the jumbo, you know, um, and a small soda and maybe cracker jacks and even a a youthsiz cap, it would have cost the Cubs in 2023 $4 million. Now, that’s not buckus to me, right? Right. But it is buckus to every one of the 30 major league owners, even those who refused to spend money on players. And that same year, the Cubs spent $31 million paying Jason Hayward to play for the Dodgers. So, I don’t want to hear that they don’t have the money. And even if it costs them a little bit, it’s a 12 billion industry. It’s also marketing, though. I mean, how much do they spend on commercials and promos and putting themselves out there? $4 million to bring it like not even advertising to fans to literally get them in. And Jane, I think you you might be missing something, too. If if you’re spending a little bit on the kid, that’s cool. Isn’t mom or dad or the parent also buying a ticket, paying for parking, buying merch for themselves? Like, aren’t you drumming up more business that way, too? And and interest. Yes. Exactly. And I would even, you know, we know all know that baseball’s gotten crazy expensive. Yes. Um, and most people can’t afford it. If you’re a a a lower class earning family, whether you’re white, black, Hispanic, I don’t care what you are, you know, it’s damn hard to afford to take a family of four to a game. You know, a beer is $18, right? Yeah. I mean, God knows that margarita is way worse, but um but um so I would have a section at at those games where you first come, first serve. Everybody gets in free in that section and gets food for free. That is a that is a direct steal from the Savannah Bananas who used that technique to build the crazy audience they now have. That’s a lot to think about right there. And I know Jane kind of went even further with the free food, free seating for families. I’m just going to keep it to the idea of 10 or younger here, you get free admission to a Major League Baseball game. So, let’s go back and and revisit this part first. 10 and under, free Major League Baseball tickets, not merchandise, not food. If you’re 10 and under, how about free tickets to a game with your corresponding adult parent or guardian? kind of sounds wild at first, like, “Wow, would they really do that?” But it’s also not terribly difficult to identify who a 10-year-old is and have their parent get the free ticket, buy themselves a ticket. There’s a clear purpose here, like what Major League Baseball would be after. There’s also a giant looming question. Could it work? Would anybody try it? First off, I think the answer is probably not, but we’ll get to that in a second. Could it actually work? Could this influence more young fans into watching baseball, becoming a baseball fan for the rest of their lifetime? Which I do think is an important consideration. We’ll get to my takeaways at the end here. As much as attendance and ratings baseball say are up, yeah, but with what demographic is your fan base only getting older, what about the future fan base and the health of it and the interest of it as we exist here in 2025? There’s a couple different things like to make this work I think we need to understand and Jane kind of mentioned it there. There would have to be established rules. You can’t give tickets to any and every game. And you can’t expect that like when the Yankees come to town or when the Red Sox come to town or when there’s a geographical rival rivalry like Angels Dodgers, it’s going to be impossible for any team to block out free tickets. So, we’re only talking about the less desirable games here. blocks of tickets you’d have to think would only be made available for 10 and under free tickets within like 36 hours of the game time. Teams can look at their sales, they can look at their inventory and say, “All right, we might have 3,000 tickets or a lot more.” But let’s say let’s say 3,000 tickets to give away to kids. Will anybody take us up on that? These are obviously the unsold and likely worst seats in the house. They’re also probably the cheapest seats, but again, what’s the cost versus the actual price here? Like, what does it cost the team to do it versus what they’re charging? Like, the price might be high, but the cost of giving them a free ticket is what? Zero, if not much. It’s obviously also not the same opportunity in every major league baseball market. Some towns, they some cities and towns, they sell out their baseball stadium all the time. So, you know, you might have a harder time as the fan of the Dodgers maybe versus a team like the Royals. I don’t know. I’m just making this up. Not every major league market is going to have the same opportunity in volume for kids. And I think you’d also have to cap it and say what, two kids under age 10 and under maximum per parent. Like that would be a reasonable situation. But what about a family of of five? You know, mom, dad, three kids. Anyway, my point is you’d have to figure out a way so that one parent isn’t bringing 10 kids age 10 and under for free to the baseball game. You’re not doing Billy’s birthday party absolutely free. Baseball is is having or is getting the ability to address the empty seat factor here. So many teams have stadiums and ballparks way bigger than they actually need on a routine basis. that Monday night, that Thursday afternoon, that even Sunday sometimes at the end of the season as football season is also coinciding. Like the stadiums are huge, you see all those empty seats. Attendance is given out. I get it. There’s always an announced attendance, but the eye test tells you better. Visuals matter more than the attendance number that’s given. Wow, 24,000, but that stadium looks more like 13,000 for today’s baseball game. filling the seats adds to the interest level. It adds to the hype around something. It makes it maybe um not more exclusive, but it it it generates more interest to see, wow, there’s a lot of people there. Maybe I should go to a game next time. Weekend and summer day games, you’d have to think like kids aren’t probably going to go to that Tuesday night game that starts at 7:05. They may not be able to stay up that late. I don’t know. But it’s summertime, especially if we’re talking about the 10 and under demographic. Like as a dad of a child in that age range, like they’re in bed by 7, 7:30, 8:00, so probably not going to a night baseball game, but hey, weekend and summer day games, they could be full with kids. Baseball teams could do this. It’s also a revenue creator. I know we’re talking about giving away tickets for free, but if you’re only giving the tickets away to 10 and under, yes, you’re going to lose out on potential revenue, but you weren’t selling those tickets anyway to just kids. That’s it. That’s the only place you lose out here is you’re not charging kids 10 and under for their seat. But teams will gain on revenue from parking because mom or dad or the guardian had to park the car to go to the game. Probably had to buy some food if they’re there for 3 hours with a hungry seven-year-old, if you know what I mean. Merchandise. Daddy, daddy, I want this. I want that. All right. You’re probably going to buy something. I guess you could get in for free. Just pay for one adult ticket. take public transportation. That could also be a method here. But likely teams are going to gain on something because of this business they weren’t going to create if not for allowing a 10-year-old or under in for free. The actual value again of the seat is far less than the ticket price anybody pays for. So we could talk about, well, those seats would retail for $24.95. Yeah, but what does it cost the team to have that seat there and have it entirely empty? like it’s not what you think. Essentially, if we add up the value of what it costs the team, how much they’ll they’ll lose on this versus how much they’ll gain, they really won’t lose a lot and they actually have so much to gain tangibly and intangibly. So, let’s hypothetically say, and I know Jane was talking more about giving kids free food and hot dogs and a Cubs hat, whatever, but if it’s really $4 million per team per season, let’s just throw out that number. I mean, honestly, I will I will even ring this all the way up to $10 million. Let’s say that every team across baseball does this and it costs them on average $10 million. I mean, isn’t that what you might spend on advertising or marketing or just a flatout write off of your business expense? $10 million to a major league baseball team, to most major league baseball teams, when you look at their expenses, when you look at their payroll, when you look at how they spend their money, and by the way, they don’t share this. It’s all private and it’s in the books that are never shared, but this is an affordable expense to assure the future of your business. And again, this is the expense. What if you made that four or 10 million right back on fans and parents who normally weren’t going to come to the game with their children, but now they are. So, I’m saying like this is a worst case scenario. Even if you lost that much to get all this, it’s not a bad proposition. And I also think like intangibly, you know, you can you talk about money and how much revenue you’re going to create versus what you might lose. How about this part of it? Like you’re making future fans. What’s the value on that? Kids watching in person versus watching on television. It’s far more memorable to go to the ball game, maybe get an autograph, maybe try and catch a foul ball, run laps around the stadium. All of those things are the memories that kids create that they’re not able to ever forget. Under 10 traditions are likely to carry over, I would think, into adolescent years. So, it’s not like when you turn 11, well, you don’t get the free tickets anymore, but you’ve been going to games for years. it’s something you enjoy. All of a sudden, we’ve got a bunch of 11year-olds and 12y olds and 13-year-olds who are hooked on going to Major League Baseball games because they liked going there. It’s still a great environment to go to. It also creates family bonds and traditions to specific teams. This is a long-term investment. Okay, let’s get to the takeaways. Let’s sum all of this up here. This adds up in my brain. This adds up in my heart. If I’m owner of a Major League Baseball team, I am deeply considering this. I’m having my group of people go over this with me. Let’s talk about this from all aspects. What are the drawbacks? What are the the good parts? What are what are we missing here? And what’s obvious here? It all adds up to me. But I’m also here to say that Jane’s idea is very unlikely that all or even any Major League Baseball team would go for this promotion wholesale. You might even be able to find an example of one team who does this from, let’s say, May 15th, you know, like when they think school’s getting out until August 31st. You may see some teams do this. I’m not talking about a portion of the season, although that might work, too. Uh Jane is saying wholesale every team across the league. That’s a big advertising push. That’s a big familyfriendly thing to put out there. I’m just saying I don’t think any team is going to do this start to finish in a season. And I certainly don’t think all teams would jump on board. It’s unfortunate, but for some reason, they just can’t. This is maybe too creative for them. It’s too out of the box for them. And again, we hear the comments of attendance and ratings are up for Major League Baseball, and it’s a two or 3% boost and ratings growth and attendance growth for three straight seasons of Major League Baseball. Again, though, I urge you to dive into the demographics. who’s going to these games more and watching these games more consistently. It’s an older audience. Baseball has always edged as a little more of an older audience, but now it’s becoming even more extreme. And the younger demographics are not what they once were. And if you were to have a choice, do you want your older aged fans to be increasing or your younger aged fans to be increasing? I think you already know the answer. The instinct for me beyond what I’ve already seen is that baseball has and is still losing young fans. And again, for allowing young kids 10 and under into baseball games for free, like what it costs versus the value of what it’s worth, I see it. Jane’s idea is not so crazy to me. But let me know what you think about it in the comments section below. Be sensible. Be realistic. Open your mind a little bit and maybe tell me why this could not possibly happen if I’m ab actually absolutely missing something. Also, thumbs up down there helps me the video and the channel. And don’t forget to subscribe. I would love to see you back here next time.

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