Best Baseball Team for the Buck: Arizona Diamondbacks
Let's face it — while there are a lot of wonderful reasons to go to a ball game, there are only a few things you really want to see: The home team hitting balls out of the park and scoring runs, your pitchers throwing strikes, and most of all, your team picking up the W.
So, just as the new season gets underway, we created the MoneyWatch Price/Performance ratio, and ranked all 30 major league teams. Just as stock analysts compare a company's earnings per share to the price of its stock, we compared the cost of an average home game ticket over the course of last season with each teams' at-home performance in four categories: home runs, total runs scored, strikeouts, and wins, giving the last category the most weight.
The rankings appear in the table below, and the results may surprise you. While the Yankees and Red Sox may be perennial powerhouses when it comes to pennant runs, they come up short when measured by P/P. With their high average ticket prices of $51.83 and $52.32, respectively, they come in 28th and 29th place. (Yankees fans may not care that they are third-worst, just so long as they edged out the Sox.) And alas, some losing streaks endure no matter what the yardstick — the Chicago Cubs were dead last. Whether or not you believe in the Billy Goat curse, long-suffering Cubs fans pay the highest average ticket price in the league, $52.56, according to Team Marketing Report, to witness a paltry number of wins at Wrigley (35) and mostly average numbers in the other categories.
The team that provided the best bang for the buck hails from a state that could use a little good news. Arizona Diamondback fans paid the lowest average ticket price in the league, $14.31 — roughly the cost of a Phoenix condo — to witness the seventh-most home runs, yielding a price per homer over the course of the season of just $11.83. (Compare that with the Seattle Mariners, who charged fans a whopping $59.08 per home run at Safeco Field.) The Diamondbacks also had a decent number of home wins (40) for a team with a lousy overall record. Second best overall are the Atlanta Braves, which had one of the lowest average ticket prices ($17.05), the most home wins last season (56), and the third-most strikeouts at home (666).
As good as Atlanta’s pitching was, the teams offering the best value in terms of strikeouts were the San Diego Padres ($1.77 per home strikeout) and the Diamondbacks again ($2.04 per K). Worst in this category was the Yankees, at $7.23 per home strikeout. It’s important to point out that we used last year’s ticket prices; some teams are now offering discount tickets and other deals this year to bring more people into the ballpark.
Research compiled by Frank Riolo
How we ranked the teams: Using 2010 ticket prices — compiled by Team Marketing Report — and 2010 statistics for home ballpark performance from ESPN.com , Yahoo Sports, and MLB.com, we calculated each team’s cost per win, home run, run scored, and strikeout recorded at home, and ranked them from 1 to 30 in each. We then averaged each team’s rank across the four categories, and weighted their ranking on cost per wins twice as much as their other scores to reflect the supreme importance of seeing your home team victorious.
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