Use foreclosures to sell Marlins' season tickets ... by gimleteye

(Eyeonmiami readers are a self-selecting, highly intelligent bunch-- but in this case, I fear setting off light bulbs among the dim witted: the following is meant as satire.)


Certain inefficiencies are apparent as Miami-Dade taxpayers get ready to pay, over decades, nearly $3 billion for a new professional baseball stadium for the Florida Marlins. For the past two years, the Marlins have the lowest average attendance in the Major Leagues. The Miami Herald reports: "Last year, they drew 1.34 million and averaged an MLB-low 16,668. They are last in average attendance this year at 18,117, barely lower than Oakland (18,127)." The Marlins brass are already wondering how to fill the seats of the brand-spanking new 37,000 seat stadium rising in the midst of the worst economy since the Depression. It would be unfortunate if the new Marlins stadium is half empty after spending so many billions.

How do you bring more people to the games? Give them something valuable for free. A novel idea: offer free houses to taxpayers who buy season tickets to the Marlins. Don't call them "foreclosures", call them tickets at a very good price. How might this work in the case of foreclosures and season tickets to professional baseball? Baseball teams are accustomed to giving away toy wooden bats, pennants and other tokens of fan appreciation on specially designated nights. This practice simply needs to be expanded to include foreclosed homes.


The Florida Marlins might be last in the Major Leagues in attendance, but Florida is third in the nation for foreclosures. There has been "a 33 percent increase over the 38,000 foreclosures filed during the first six months of last year, and nearly seven times more than were filed during the same period in 2007." South Florida Business Journal reports, "In the last six months lenders have filed more than 52,000 foreclosures in South Florida and it’s expected that by the time the year is over there will be more than 100,000 foreclosures filed in the tri-county area, according to a new report from Condo Vultures LLC."

There are approximately 80 home games in a baseball season. There are currently about 60,000 foreclosures in Miami-Dade County. Am I suggesting that 700 foreclosures should be given away to season ticket holders of the Florida Marlins at each home game? Yes. It has to be big. It has to be dramatic.

If you had a 1 in 50 chance of winning a house through ownership of a season ticket with the Florida Marlins, I am guessing two things would happen: the Marlins would have no problem filling their seats with season ticket holders, and two, the number of foreclosures would be drastically reduced by "Baseball Fever: Catch It!".

Obtaining these foreclosures would require Congressional approval. This is a low bar since Congress granted a monopoly to Major League Baseball in the 1920's. Now, since the federal government already owns the vast majority of the nation's foreclosures through financial institutions and insurance companies backed by taxpayer obligations, the matter of moving foreclosures from the books of banks to baseball teams is a paper entry.

Without this kind of incentive, the $3 billion dollar Marlins stadium might not draw additional fan support, based on information supplied by The Bleacher Report.Com: "Even professional sports can’t avert this economic crisis. The economy is affecting everything from family-owned businesses to the NFL. It was announced on December 9, that the NFL was going to be cutting about 10 percent of their staff due to the economy. Also, in September the NBA stated that they had to release about nine percent of their staff. The Arena Football league stated on December 14 that the league would not play the 2009 Arena Football season. MLB has seen its attendance dip for the first time in four years. And NASCAR probably is the hardest hit by this. ... The NFL said that they would have to release about 150 people in their staff in NFL Films in New Jersey, Internet production facilities in Los Angeles, and their front office in Manhattan. ... The Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants and New York Jets are asking hundreds of thousands of dollars from season ticket holders for seats in their new stadiums."

My point: don't stop at Major League Baseball. There is a world of hurt that could be solved by matching abundance of foreclosures with scarcity of season ticket holders in other professional sports. There is no reason for economic misery to keep people from attending sports and other stadium-based entertainments when so much is being spent on new stimulus projects like the new stadium in Miami for the Florida Marlins.

Let them eat hotdogs, but if they buy a season ticket, give them the key to a house. Foreclosuresforseasontickets.com: you read it here, first.