Recently I came across an article by Justin Merry in the Wall Street Journal entitled Can a Ballclub’s Record Justify Its Beer Prices? . The main portion of his article is based around the idea that the price charged for a beer at the ballpark should reflect the team’s regular season record. Merry argues that some of the best teams in the league can justify having the most expensive beer prices, while the worst, such as the Washington Nationals should “give beer away for free.” As a resident of DC, viewing a game in the new Nationals Stadium while in the nation’s capital is justification enough for me to watch a game, but let’s take a closer look at the data. Using the data collected by Team Marketing Report for the 2009 Major League Season, I thought Finder! and Maker! would be a great way to really visualize this data as well as some of the other costs associated with attending a game for the average fan.

The first map displays the correlation between regular season standings and the average cost of beer by ballpark. The correlation between the two is not that great with .32. This could be used to confirm that ballclubs with losing records and pricey beer can’t justify making fans pay that much to drink while watching the game. Let’s examine the data a little bit closer. Click each map for a larger view.

Teams such as the Pirates, Nationals, and Diamondbacks have terrible regular season standings, but also have pretty low cost of beer. So, if you are looking for a game to watch and drink cheap beer, these would be your best options. The Oakland Athletics stands out on the scatter plot because they have a great regular season record but also have some of the most expensive beer in the biz. So, perhaps the cost is justified because the team has a better record and fans might not mind sipping the premium suds.

I thought it might be interesting to also see whether the fan cost index correlated with the team’s regular season record. The Fan Cost Index comprises the prices of two (2) adult average-price tickets, two (2) child average-price tickets, two (2) small draft beers, four (4) small soft drinks, four (4) regular-size hot dogs, parking for one (1) car, two (2) game programs and two (2) least expensive, adult-size adjustable caps.

The FCI and regular season record correlation is slightly higher than the cost of beer correlation at .45, which means that about half of the time ballclubs with a high FCI also have a high win record. There are again some outliers, which can be viewed in the map below.

The NY Yanks have a regular season record of .637 and a FCI of $410.88, which means if you want to see a team with a good record, you’ve got to shell out the big bucks. If you don’t mind watching a team lose while you take your family to a game, again the Pirates or the Diamonbacks might be a good choice as the FCI for those teams is 135.06 and 114.24 respectively, and both teams have .385 and .438 records respectively.

Either way you look at it there is no team that has a perfect correlation and with so many die hard fans out there for Major League Baseball, people will pay the bucks for their teams no matter what. It might be interesting to take this data and do a correlation between FCI and fan attendance and see whether or not there is a trend in the past ten years towards less attendance for certain teams and whether or not that has to do with the teams records or the average FCI associated with that ballpark. Are people less likely to attend a game because the FCI is too high or because the team stinks? Explore the data out there and see if you can come up with an interesting correlation for this or anything else you think is provocative, feel free to post a comment with your analysis.

In the meantime, have a beer and go support your local team.

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