You don’t go to baseball games anymore. You subscribe to them.

One of my favorite memories with my grandfather was going with him to a Cubs game back in the mid-90s when I was probably 11 or 12. We drove up to the big city in his roomy minivan from his small “just a little too far away to be a suburb” town south of Chicago. It’s a drive that gets significantly more interesting the further north you drive, passing by empty, endless farmland, through suburban sprawl, to eventually seeing the Sears tower peek out in the distance and watching it and the rest of the skyline move behind you as you take Lake Shore Drive north to Wrigleyville with skyscrapers to your left and uninterrupted Lake Michigan to your right. In Wrigleyville, we paid a guy $10 to park the van in his driveway under the El tracks, walked a few blocks through the neighborhood to the ticket window and asked what seats were available that day (at that time, most of them). For a few more bucks we had a nice view on the 3rd base line and enjoyed an overcast afternoon game in one of the better places to experience baseball.

That warm, carefree memory of casually dropping in to catch a baseball game is sealed in an era of the past because the live baseball viewing experience is completely different now. It’s not just because of how Wrigley Field itself has changed since then, although the new digital scoreboards and plaza around the ballpark are emblematic of a shifting model of business for baseball.

Now, if you hop on the Red Line outside of Wrigley Field and take the El a dozen or so stops south, you’ll arrive at the White Sox’s Guaranteed Rate Field where you no longer can enter the game with a ticket printed from home (though you may obtain physical tickets from the will call office).

Major League Baseball has changed their ticketing policy in 2019, to encourage you to use their app to get into the ballpark — or discourage you by making it really inconvenient not to use the app.

That Tweet above has a lot to take in so I’m going to try and unpack it a little for. Consider the assumptions and implications of all of these steps in order to attend a baseball game.

Needless to say, we’ve come quite a long way from buying tickets in cash at the box office to giving MLB.com my occupation, income, marital status and number of children. Good lord! What do they want to do with that information?

The answer is that this is baseball’s new revenue model fully realized thanks to better technology: build a captive audience in the park and watching on television to sell their attention to advertisers, while collecting valuable data used for promotions, list-trades, market research and targeted ads. As the ever wise Dave Zirin recently penned:

The advertising deals from baseball have been wildly lucrative. In 2018, Major League Baseball saw their revenue increase with $10.3 billion in profit across the league with ticket sales alone accounting for just around a third of total revenue.

In other words your eyeballs and the data you can give are more valuable to MLB than your butt in the bleachers. I have to admit, I’m actually pretty impressed with how baseball teams have managed to sneak in more advertising during a game. The person who thought of making an inside pitch or double play call a branding opportunity is quite brilliant.

A little diabolical, but brilliant:

As a huge baseball fan, I’m incredibly torn with the new economics of the sport. They don’t benefit the fans much and little of these new revenue streams are coming back to the players. But the only opt-out option is to quit watching baseball. And I don’t want to do that.

Yet, I should be honest with myself in this new reality. And as consumers, and sports fans we ought to ask a few questions as we join each of these ecosystems. Does having an app and an account with a team give us added value proportional to what we’re giving them? Are we okay with being tracked and having this data collected about us and used for purposes outside of our control? And maybe at a lesser level, is managing another set of logins and passwords, having to clumsily show your smartphone to get into a ballpark along with thousands of other people worth the hassle?

I don’t know. But I do know that catching a ballgame isn’t as much fun as it used to be.

You don’t go to baseball games anymore. You subscribe to them.

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