MLB Financials by Year

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Baseball Financials: Fancost

By Patrick Mondout

Fancost is a figure used to represent how much it costs fans to have a typical night out at the ballpark. You can see team-by-team figures for each season from 1991 forward by clicking on a year in the table on the right:

Teammarketing.com has developed what they call the Fan Cost Index to track the cost of attending an event (such as a baseball game) for a family of four. We include their calculation for each team going back to the 1991 season. To fully understand the calculation, you should visit their site.

The 2005 Boston Red Sox hold the all-time record for the most expensive fancost in baseball at $276.41 (and it wasn't even close - more than $100 over average according to the table on the right). For that amount a family of four in Boston could expect two adult averaged-priced tickets and two children's admissions, four small soft drinks, two small beers, four hot dogs, parking, and two adult-sized caps (to represent souvenir sales). Our they could pay their mortgage!

The fancost data used here was compiled by Rodney Fort from Teammarketing.com. Fort is a professor of economics at Washington State University who has a passion for the economics of sports. He has an excellent site full of data related to the economics of sports.

On our yearly team pages (1996 Baltimore Orioles or 1929 New York Yankees, for example) we also include a second fancost number which is simply the first number multiplied by 81. This is meant to give some idea how much it might cost a family of four to go to a full season's worth of games, but it is understood that the figure is misleading. Season tickets sell at a discount to individual tickets (as used in the calculation above) and it seems unlikely that a family of four would spend $15 per game for hats (that is the figure for the 2005 Red Sox).