Ingram's April 2024

EDITOR’S NOTE

by Joe Sweeney

Baseball Isn’t Football, and Vice Versa

The differences in fan appeal, in my view, account for the way voters shot down owner John Sherman’s pro posal to relocate the baseball stadium Downtown. It didn’t help that the team’s positioning had a rushed feel to it—mul tiple site plans, timetables, estimates of community impact (especially on busi ness), and a few other unforced errors creating doubt in the minds of some voters. The nonsense about potentially leaving Kansas City didn’t help, even if the scuttlebutt suggested a new home close by in the suburbs. As for Arrowhead, I believe this would have sailed through had it been presented as a one-issue vote for the Chiefs alone. Let’s face it: The place is a shrine, and you hear its praises sung by every network broadcaster every time there’s a nationwide telecast. But that game-day atmosphere didn’t exist with the first kickoff there in 1972; it had to evolve over decades, and the team has done the right thing to promote a fan experience that goes beyond the 60 minutes of the game clock. It didn’t help to hear thinly veiled threats about “assessing our options” if voters didn’t comply. The right message from 1 Arrowhead Drive should have been: “This is our home, and our fans built it. We’re stay ing no matter what, and we’d like to reward your faith over the years with an even bet- ter experience, but we need your help.” Far from being a potential public gift to billionaires, the $800 million Arrow head upgrade would have been grounded in $300 million from the team and Hunt family. That ain’t chicken scratch. As for new stadiums, Kansas should step up and recruit—as should Clay County. I believe Jackson County officials blew it more than greed from any entity. Wherever the teams land, the Royals benefit from tax incentives should be contingent upon delivering winning teams and seasons. It is refreshing to see signs of progress, but it’s been a long time coming. Way, way too much energy is spent chas- ing tax support instead of fielding a team. Each team is better off going back to the drawing board with stand-alone proposals to address their own interests. The voters and fans deserve that much.

Chiefs and Royals erred in combining their site-renovation funding plan as a straight up-or-down vote in Jackson County. First off, yes, we are a city of bandwagon-jumpers. News flash: so is every other major metro area in the country with a pro sports franchise, with the possible exception of Cubs fans in baseball and Packers fans in football. It’s human nature—people like to affiliate with organizations they see as hugely successful. That said, you shouldn’t draw the wrong inferences from the April 2 debacle of a public vote on extending a county sales tax to finance a new Royals stadium and an Arrowhead makeover. The immediate reaction might be to think that fans here don’t support their teams, and with a margin of better than 58-41 percent opposed, it’d be easy to reach that conclusion. You’d be wrong to think that, on a couple of levels. First, look at the fans. While there’s certainly some overlap, the Royals and Chiefs largely have distinctly separate fan bases. That could be a function of stadium size: Arrowhead has nearly In the history of Kauffman Stadium, going back half a century now and covering more than 4,000 unique home games, the Royals have averaged 22,231 fans per game. Yes, that’s an average. And it comes to less than 60 percent in a stadium with a capacity of 39,700. Think about that. Even with the comparatively lower cost of a ticket to a baseball game, two of every five seats have been empty for more than 50 seasons. And to put that into national context, the Royals for most of the George Brett years were easily outdrawing the rest of the American League—an unbroken 18-year run in that regard, peaking at 153 percent of AL attendance in 1978. But the dropoff since the early 1990s has been profound. Now, go across the parking lot to Arrowhead. I can’t find a comprehensive data set of attendance by game going back to their first season here in 1963, but Pro Football Reference has a pretty robust compilation starting with the 1994 season, and 30 years’ worth of records surely carries some weight. In that respect, the Chiefs have almost always exceeded NFL averages on Sundays. Until the stadium-building craze brought online some enormous venues over the past decade, the Chiefs even led the league in per-game attendance through the late 1990s. Over the past 30 years, they’re beating the NFL’s per-team draw by 15.68 percent, and the average crowd per home game still hits nearly 75,000, even with losing 2,000 seats in the 2010 remodel. twice the seating capacity of The K and host far fewer games. Lots of people who don’t go to Royals games wouldn’t miss the rough-edged pageantry of tailgating and footbal at Arrowhead. More importantly, you have to take into account the way fans here have previously voted— for decades—with their dollars. Let’s be honest: Even with four World Series seasons including wins in 1985 and 2015, people haven’t backed the Royals with the fervor Chiefs’ fans bring to the game.

Fans here support their teams more than they’re being given credit for after a botched vote on stadium funding plans.

Joe Sweeney Editor-In-Chief and Publisher E | JSweeney @ Ingrams.com

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April 2024

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