Posted by Geoff Young on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 9:44 am

Here’s my question about the World Baseball Classic: Why is the target audience rich, childless, jobless people who don’t like basketball? I’m no marketing genius, but I’m thinking the folks in charge would have been better off going after baseball fans.

I went to all four games at Petco Park in 2006 and had a blast. This time around, I’m just not that into it. I attended the free workouts on Saturday and bought some swag, but I’ll watch the games on TV and/or TiVo.

My basic gripes are as follows:

• The ticket prices are outrageous. A seat in the upper tank behind home plate runs $50 for a single game. That same seat costs $19 during the regular season. Sure, you can get into the park with a “park pass” for $15, but that just lets you hang out in the grassy area beyond center field and watch the game on a giant video screen and/or wander around the ballpark and watch from various standing positions. That same pass runs $5 during the regular season. In other words, you pay three times face value for the privelege of not having a seat for an exhibition game. Where’s the value?
• The games start at 8 p.m. local time. If you have to get up in the morning and go to work or see your kids off to school, as many baseball fans do, you’ll need to leave around the fourth inning or so. But bear in mind that you’ve already paid two to three times what your tickets are worth to get in and see the game. If you didn’t have to drive home, you could watch an extra inning or two on TV in the comfort of your own living room and without the insane ticket prices. So, for a family of four, let’s go cheap and say you could watch four innings on a giant screen at the ballpark for $60 plus concessions. Or you could watch maybe six innings on your own TV for nothing. That’s a tough decision.
• The games take place during March Madness. I’m not a big hoops fan, but I know people who live for the NCAA Tournament. Many of them also like baseball but don’t start thinking about it until after college basketball season is over. Brackets have become an institution in the United States, and it boggles the imagination that baseball thinks it can compete against the Tourney with anything other than egg on its face.

So, we’ve alienated the non-wealthy (always a good idea in the current economy), parents, working professionals, and college basketball fans. And then we wonder why fewer than 10,000 people show up at Petco Park on a Monday night in March. Yeah, that’s a big mystery we’ve got there…

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