BASEBALL BUCKS : Big A Is Back in Business, but Strike’s Effects Are Still Costing Stadium and Companion Economy

With its long-awaited return to the Big A this week, big league baseball is hoping to not only heal the wounds of fans jaded by eight months of high-stakes labor disputes but also to restart its companion “baseball economy” that got burned by the 30-game blackout.

The cancellation of 21 home games last year and nine this year has meant a loss of about $10 million to the stadium and its concessions, full and part-time employees, and myriad hotels, restaurants and other businesses that depend on the Angels at home.

But the good news is that even with attendance figures this year that are expected to be among the lowest in two decades, the return of baseball should generate about $80 million for the Orange County economy.

“That’s not a whole lot in an economy of $74 billion,” says Esmael Adibi, director of the Chapman University Center for Economic Research. “But it still is significant.”

It will mean that Clougherty Packing Co. in Vernon will sell about 75 miles of its Farmer John brand hot dogs to stadium concessionaire Ogden Entertainment this year--839,520 of the six-inch franks.

And it will mean that college student Dina Tasso, 20, of Orange will make about $3,200 selling popcorn at the Angels’ 72 home games as one of about 600 regular part-timers who work for Ogden Entertainment. Tasso says that last year she lost $1,000 to the strike, which cut 21 home games from the schedule just as school was starting at Cal State Fullerton.

And the Doubletree Hotel in Orange, which has contracts to house most of the teams that play the Angels, will pull in about $170,000 for visiting players’ rooms during the season, says Mike Kelleher, the hotel’s marketing director. The hotel will also get about $85,000 from food and beverage sales to the visiting players and coaches and to the fans who drop by before and after each home game. Total baseball-related revenue: at least $255,000.

The strike cost the Doubletree $75,000 in room revenue last year and made Kelleher’s life miserable. “We had to redirect our telemarketing efforts” to target corporate and vacation travel business to take up the slack, he says, “and I had to spend a lot of time explaining to the hotel’s owners why revenue was down so much.”

Although it is difficult to pin down every dollar that the game brings to Orange County, economists say there are three principal sources: direct spending at city-owned Anaheim Stadium, spending outside the stadium and the so-called bubble-over effect.

Direct spending comes from the crowds. Barring the emergence of a spectacular rookie or unexpected development of a team that finds itself in league championship playoffs, the Angels should draw an average of 22,000 paying fans to each home game this year, stadium and team officials are predicting. Each will spend about $17.30 per game on tickets, parking, food, drinks and souvenirs: that’s almost $30 million.

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Expenditures outside the stadium by fans, advertisers, corporate sponsors and team members and their families--especially those who reside in the county and spend a big chunk of their annual pay here--should at least be equal to in-stadium spending.

Finally, each of those dollars “bubbles out” into the community, turning over about 1.5 times as stadium employees spend their share of the gate on groceries and rent and stadium suppliers spend their share on materials and their own workers’ wages: total, about $15 million.

That has been the case in other areas where the financial impact of ballparks has been studied.

In Phoenix, for example, the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche estimated in 1993 that a new covered stadium and a big league ball team would boost the Phoenix area economy by $160 million a year and the statewide economy by a total of $260 million.

A similar study in Orlando last year found that the presence there of a major league baseball expansion team would bring about $150 million a year into the economy of Orange County, Fla.

Orange County, Calif., probably doesn’t fare quite so well, said Dan Barrett, Los Angeles-based head of sports and entertainment consulting for Deloitte & Touche’s western region. The Big A is 29 years old and lacks some of the newest stadiums’ money-making amenities, such as posh luxury suites and advertising display areas strategically located to maximize television exposure. In addition, the Angels themselves haven’t been playing the kind of ball that draws huge crowds.

Still, professional baseball, like any sports franchise, brings “a significant economic benefit to community, both from related spending and from the community pride it instills and the way it advertises the community,” said Barrett, whose firm recently was retained by Anaheim to do an economic benefit analysis of the construction of an all-new, baseball-only stadium for the Angels.

Part of the financial picture can be painted by studying the direct impact the strike had on operations at the stadium last year, when the season ended six weeks early, in mid-August, and the last 21 home games were never played.

Stadium manager Smith laid off 80 part-time and eight full-time stadium employees--who still have not been recalled--in order to make up most of a $1.8-million cut in revenue to the city.

Stadium concessions manager John Trosper toted up a $3-million drop in sales and told his 600 regular game-day workers and 400 extras to look for something else to do until football started in October.

Additionally, the Angels organization let go three members of its front office staff and reported a $10-million loss for the year. (Officials wouldn’t say how much of that was directly related to the strike and how much to the team’s flagging attendance before the strike was called.)

If the strike had not ended and fill-in players had been used by the teams to stage a season of replacement ball this year, Barrett and stadium and Angels officials agree that at best attendance would have averaged only about 15,000 per game. And that would have cut about $20 million from the overall economic boost.

So expecting an overall impact of $75 million to $90 million from the resumption of big league baseball in Anaheim this year isn’t far-fetched, says economist Adibi.

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Still, they are not quite jumping for joy out there in the business world.

Many local business owners say they, just like the fans, were left feeling burned and betrayed when the players walked last August. Many say they don’t expect the fans to flock back, and that is causing them to take a wait-and-see attitude about just how financially exciting the resumption of regular team baseball in Orange County will be this year.

That’s why there are few visible signs of glee over the strike’s end outside the stadium on State College Boulevard.

The Anaheim Stadium Travelodge, for example, is festooned with signs welcoming its new owners and is promoting a free shuttle to Disneyland on its marquee--but not a word about baseball coming back to its namesake.

And at the Catch Seafood Grill and Sports Bar directly opposite the main gate to the Big A, the marquee on Friday read “Frankly Georgia, We Don’t Give a Ram,” referring not to baseball but to football. The imminent departure of the Rams from Anaheim to St. Louis is expected to suck an estimated $30 million from the local economy.

The restaurant’s general manager, Don Myers, says that sports at the stadium, especially baseball, used to be critical to his business. Hungry and thirsty fans--mostly thirsty--poured up to $600,000 a season into the restaurant’s till.

He estimates that the baseball strike probably cost the Catch $150,000 in lost revenue.

But Myers says the strike also forced the restaurant to reconsider its longstanding attitude that sports was its life’s blood. “We started marketing ourself to the hotel and convention business, and we actually ended 1994 with better total sales than we had in 1993,” he said. “Before the strike, baseball was our meat and potatoes, but now we consider it the gravy.”

That’s why, he said, he can be flip about the Rams’ leaving town.

Still, Myers said of the end of the baseball strike, “it’ll be great to have the pros back. We had one game last weekend with the replacements in the Freeway Series, which historically is one of our best weekends in bar sales, but there was nobody here. I think they had like 22,000 people at the game, and they usually have about 45,000.”

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Diminished crowds and thus diminished dollars are likely to be a problem all year long.

For the season opener Wednesday against the Detroit Tigers, the Angels are selling all tickets for $1 each and still don’t expect more than 40,000 to attend, said Kevin Uhlich, vice president of operations for the team.

In 1994, with regular ticket prices that averaged $7.60 a seat, the Angels’ home opener drew a crowd of 38,000 and grossed almost $290,000 in ticket sales. This year, the take is likely to be closer to $40,000--and that has to be divided among the Angels, Tigers, the city and Ogden Entertainment.

Ticket prices go back to normal after opening day, but without the first-day excitement and cheap seats, Uhlich expects the crowd count to drop way down as fans who still feel abandoned by baseball decide to stay home for awhile.

“There are a lot of angry fans out there and they haven’t had a voice for seven months, so this is their chance to show how they feel,” he said. “It will take time to win them back. Things will be slow until summer, when school is out.”

He agreed with Smith’s estimate that average attendance for the year will linger in “the low 20,000s” unless the Angels do the unexpected and wind up in a crowd-drawing race for a division championship or more.

Then, of course, all bets would be off, says the Doubletree’s Kelleher, who figures a season capped by playoff games that pull more teams and fans into the hotel would just about make up for the grief baseball put him through last year.

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Baseball Bucks

Because of the baseball strike, the Angels will play only 72 home games at Anaheim Stadium this season rather than the normal 81. Based on an average attendance of 22,000 per game, here’s how the gross revenue is affected:

(Figures in millions of dollars)

Source 72 games 81 games Parking $2.9 $3.4 Tickets 12.0 13.5 Food* 12.4 13.9 Totals $27.3 $30.8

* Includes drinks, souvenirs

Source: City of Anaheim