Love Baseball? Are You in the Best Baseball City?

Americans still recognize baseball as their national pastime. The 2018 World Series in full gear and tickets to see the games live costing hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its report on Best Baseball Cities

To determine the best places to be a fan of America’s third most followed sport, WalletHub compared 360 U.S. cities with at least one college or professional baseball team across 31 key metrics. They range from performance level of team(s) to average ticket price to stadium accessibility.

Best vs. Worst

• MLB: The Chicago Cubs have the best performance level, 60.21 percent, which is 1.5 times better than that of the Philadelphia Phillies and the Cincinnati Reds, the teams with the worst at 41.15 percent.
• MiLB: The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders have the best performance level, 60.29 percent, which is 1.7 times better than that of the Bristol Pirates, the team with the worst at 35.71 percent.
• NCAA: The Oregon State Beavers have the best performance level, 78.67 percent, which is 9.9 times better than that of the Saint Peters Peacocks, the team with the worst at 7.93 percent.
• Phoenix has the lowest average season ticket price (for MLB games), $19.65, which is 2.9 times less expensive than in Boston, the city with the highest at $56.97.

Want to see a baseball game but you’re on a budget. Good news you still can go see a game. “See a minor league game or, if you only mean MLB games, there are plenty of bargains if you don't mind sitting in upper deck, OF and standing room sections. Baseball, relative to the other major sports, still offers the best overall pricing structure to serve market segments with varying degrees of price responsiveness,” said John B Lord, PhD, Professor (Emeritus) of Sports Marketing, Saint Joseph's University and WalletHub expert.

“Several teams sell open-ended tickets on digital media only so that a fan can pay a set fee and attend up to every game for a defined calendar period,” said Lord. “The Braves, Phillies, Rays and Padres, at least, have done this in the last few years. You don't know where your seat is until just before game time, but it's a great way to see a lot of baseball for very little money, and a good way for the clubs to connect with young fans and incentivize them to move along the staircase and buy regular tickets.”

To view the full report and your city’s rank, please visit:

https://wallethub.com/edu/best-baseball-cities/12864/

Courtesy: WalletHub

Photo Courtesy: Salmaboskey boskey CC-BY-SA 3.0 from Wikimedia Commons