[This piece was first published on the Flushing University website on March 22, 2007. To see my latest column on that site, please click on the Flushing University Banner to the right.]
Obviously, if you want to get a sense of the extent of the popularity of the Mets and the Yankees, you have to look beyond New York City to the entire metropolitan area. A study commissioned by the Independent Budget Office of the city of New York in 1998 found that of fans attending games in Queens and the Bronx, only 33% of those at Yankee Stadium, and 39% of those at Shea were actually residents of New York City. The breakdown is quite interesting. In this 1998 survey, people at a game at Shea break down like this: Nassau/Suffolk 26%, Queens 15%, New Jersey 13%, Brooklyn 11%, Manhattan 8%, rest of the US 8%, Westchester/Rockland 5%, Connecticut 4%, Bronx 3%, Staten Island 2%, rest of New York State 2%, outside of the US 2%. The Yankee Stadium analysis produced this result: New Jersey 22%, Manhattan 13%, Westchester/Rockland 11%, Nassau/Suffolk 9%, rest of the US 9%, Connecticut 7%, rest of New York State 6%, Bronx 6%, Brooklyn 6%, Queens 6%, outside of the US 3%, Staten Island 1%. As someone who was born in Manhattan, grew up in NJ, has lived in Queens and Manhattan, now lives in Connecticut, and teaches on Long Island, I have to say that these statistics sound completely correct to me. The Mets homeland is the great coastal island; it extends from Astoria to Montauk. Yankee land is west and north of there. I think that everyone who lives in these places is fully aware of this, but there are a couple of interesting things in this survey result that I’d like to take particular note of. One is that although the Yankees are more popular than the Mets in New Jersey, a lot of Mets fans come from New Jersey.
I would explain this by looking at my own family’s history; although people from Brooklyn were more likely to move to Long Island than New Jersey, an awful lot of people from Brooklyn did end up in New Jersey. Another thing I find interesting is that a much greater portion of the Shea stadium crowd is from either Brooklyn or Staten Island than the Yankee stadium crowd. What I think this means is that even though the Yankees beat the Mets in the latest polls of baseball popularity in Brooklyn and Staten Island, people who are actually dedicated baseball fans in Brooklyn and Staten Island are somewhat more likely to be Mets fans. I would bet that this reflects the lingering anti-Yankee culture of old Brooklyn. But income demographics may also be a factor here too. The most surprising statistic in the New York City study is that only 6% of fans attending a game at Yankee stadium are from the Bronx! I take this to mean that an awful lot of diehard Yankee fans in the Bronx (and I would guess in Brooklyn as well) simply can’t afford to get to very many games. I should also mention that the average 1990 household income of the zip codes reported by the 1998 survey respondents (they didn’t actually ask people how much money they made) was $56,397 for people at Shea and $58,627 for people at Yankee stadium, per the 1990 census. These numbers were far in excess of the national average of the period. This would suggest that the median household income of people attending Mets and Yankee games in 2007 would be around $100,000, perhaps even higher for the Yankees because it has become so hard to get Yankees tickets. I’m sure the average income of fans at Shea, already very high, will fully catch up to the Yankees once they replace big and comparatively democratic Shea with the new, smallish designer stadium. These facts aren’t new and baseball teams must all be well aware of them. A detailed study conducted by Lieberman Research for Sports Illustrated in 1996 found that baseball fans between the ages of 25-49 are 62-73% more likely to be affluent, 85-90% more likely to be college-educated, and 79-91% more likely to be in professional and managerial occupations than the general population. A 2005 survey conducted by ABC and ESPN found that the more money you made, and the more education you had, the more likely you were to follow baseball.
All of this makes the lack of Mets books particularly hard to understand since, as I pointed out in my proposal, if there are so many people able to afford the hundreds of dollars it takes to take a family to a baseball game, there must be a lot of people who would pay $25 for a good new book about being a Mets fan. Still, I don’t find these facts to be comforting. One of the nicest things about baseball is the sense that it is something that all kinds of people share and enjoy. As time goes by, though, it is becoming something different. My parents developed their love of baseball as bleacher bums in Ebbets Field. They were from struggling immigrant families and were of modest means. I wonder if their equivalents in contemporary New York will develop the same love of baseball if they don’t ever have a chance to actually attend a game. I don’t blame the players and their high salaries for what has happened; I think the players as a group (rather than as individuals) are paid an appropriate amount of money for the income they generate. I don’t entirely blame the owners either; the situation we find ourselves in was created by the forces of the market, and this is what the market has wrought.
All I would ask of the owners and is that they build stadiums big enough to accommodate larger numbers of people, so that you will not have to shell out for a season ticket in order to go to an important game, or even to go to any game at all. If the stadiums are bigger, I believe that the teams will still make enough money. In conclusion, I think that we have a right to expect the owners of Major League Baseball to find ways to make baseball accessible to people who don’t have a lot of disposable income. They should build reasonably sized stadiums and they should become more creative in an attempt to make our pastime more accessible to all fans.
Baseball is one of our most important national symbols, and it would be wonderful if it could represent the best of our nation, and not just the power of the wealth within it.
