“Other” sports teams are one of the hardest things to care about. Unless it’s your rival or your favorite team, a fan in Cleveland won’t give one lick what a baseball team in, say, California is doing. But the recently announced move of the Oakland Athletics (the A’s in laymen’s terms) to Fremont has repercussions that will affect not just baseball, but all sports (even hockey).
After years of sharing their stadium with the Oakland Raiders, the A’s announced Tuesday that they will be moving south to Fremont, an area closer to Silicon Valley, by 2011. Cisco Systems, a computer and networking firm, will be a major sponsor of the project and will probably get naming rights.
However, most interesting are the plans for the new ballpark, which is to be a technological marvel. Seats will have laptops for spectators to see instant replays, tickets will be stored on cell phones, fans will get real-time digital scorecards and digital ads will switch to cater to the members of the crowd. Plans are also in the works to allow fans to take pictures on a crowd camera and have them displayed on the jumbotron. Think of it as Willy Wonka’s factory for tech-heads.
But what does this mean for you, besides making you immensely jealous of the A’s, who already have a book and philosophy to their name. Well, the jealousy is exactly what makes it important. With new stadiums opening up like hotcakes, baseball execs are constantly looking to one-up each other with their new ballparks (just look what a new stadium did for St. Louis). Oakland/Fremont will lead the pack in sheer awesomeness, but expect more tech-stadiums to follow. The Mets and Yankees are both starting construction on new stadiums, and with the money-laden market in New York, they’ll probably be shelling out benjamins to get computers in their bleachers, too.
However, as any Medill freshman knows, technology is expensive. Somebody has to foot the bill for all of this, whether it be corporations (Cisco says they will fund the park without any public money), taxpayers or team management. No matter who does it, the costs will be tremendous, and ticket sales will shoot up. That means the end of $5 College I.D. nights, Dollar Dog Days and free tickets with jersey purchases. Additionally, the stadiums will be smaller in order to make tickets more desirable (In fact, Oakland already instituted that plan). All in all, that means tickets are more expensive and less accessible for young and broke fans like, say, college students.
On the bright side, though, this will make some small-market teams more profitable. Oakland says it plans to join the highest tier of baseball teams. Consider Cleveland, a middle- to small-market team. After they built their new stadium, Jacobs Field, they sold out for seven consecutive seasons (it didn’t hurt that the team was dominant). These attractive new stadiums in a place like Kansas City will make more out-of-market fans come in, evening out the ridiculously unequal baseball market.
Don’t expect this to just stick to baseball, either. Soon enough, you will be able to see Lebron both in person and on your in-seat display screen. You and the zebras will have the ability to see if that last play was a touchdown when this technology spreads to football stadiums. It may soon reach the point that you’ll be better off just buying an HDTV so you can watch the games from home. It’ll probably be cheaper.
