What’s the world coming to? I mean, who would ever believe the DBacks FO is remotely responsive to its fans?

I mean I repeatedly ask for a red carpet strewn with rose petals and a trumpet fanfare whenever I enter the stadium, but NO, it’s too much trouble.

Another insider shill writes this story, no doubt… :-)

Well-played!

(Uh oh, I’m shilling for you again)

shedding some new light on old issues and introducing new stuff entirely (Commissioner Hall?).

I was delighted with some of it. Other parts, not so much. I think both “camps” have positive takeaways here. I’ll have plenty to say about it later, after you guys do your little “Best Franchise in Baseball” dance :-)

i don’t comment enough on this site anymore, despite visiting every day, even in the offseason. i guess i never have anything better to say than “great article.”

i think hall is a great guy. the other day, i was remembering the final game of the 2005 [or was it ‘6] season (padres win, clinch the division and celebrate on the field after a horrible call at 2nd base on Young), when they flashed derrick hall onto the jumbotron for the first time and the sold out crowd stood and boo’d, myself included. i feel bad about that.

i met hall at the fanfest, and he was superbly nice to my girlfriend and i; gave her advice on how to be a good vice president, and wished me luck in an upcoming amateur league season. i’m still grateful, but it wont affect how many games i attend this year (hoping to top last year’s lifetime high of 28).

How do we reconcile it with all of the “Arizona has the worst fans in baseball” chatter? I had no idea that the median income in Phoenix was so low compared to other MLB cities.

it sounds like the front office is doing a good job (at least in the fan relations department) in an extremely challenging market.

thirty or so points of contention, I have no gripe with the overall tone. Broad sourcing on Derrick. It’s Fortune, so clearly pro business, but few outright errors for such a detailed piece. Cant reasonably address everything at once, so will focus on DH and marketing for now. That will come across rather negative, cuz that’s where we butt heads – but I enjoyed the commissioner talk, Hall’s rehearsed Horatio Alger saga, the glowing Reinsdorf and Omalley Quotes. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting Derrick doesnt “deserve” any of that.

Ok, here’s the bullets:

In one of the hardest-hit parts of the country, the Arizona Diamondbacks are emerging as a case study of how to keep sports fans loyal during the recession ($1.50 hot dogs, anyone?)

Keyword “emerging”. I’m fine with that.

What scares Hall most about the economy is the potential impact on ticket sales.

Tix are normally that recession-resistant revenue stream (in the modern baseball model), but K&M bullied the single ticket side of their business for years. Conditions now require Derrick win it back. This will be a good test to see how nimble he is.

Because the sports world glided over past recessions, executives don’t have a lot of experience managing through financial crises. The Diamondbacks are an exception.

Woo hoo! So…Jerry’s excess favorably girded these guys for the current recession? Who knew! The Don who keeps on giving ;-)
 
Their fan-friendly approach was born of an earlier crisis – albeit one of management’s own making.

Not sure, but I think he means the debt, which – if so – would be the most substantial error in the piece. The eventual “fan-friendly” approach was born of growing fan alienation, stemming from both regimes. Glossing over this extended rift, or suggesting Kendrick suddenly arrived with equal (let alone superior) customer service, ignores all the C/S year to year data.

Hall’s early efforts with the Diamondbacks focused on improving what he terms the “experiential” aspects…It was like a carnival down there," Hall says. “It was cluttered with carts and food stands, with lots of purple and yellow everywhere.” Garfinkel (Mr Target remodel) chimes in: Now when you walk in, you see the field, you smell the grass. You feel like you’re in a ballpark.

We’ve chatted about this boilerplate before. Is it really less cluttered? More importantly, is the ballpark experience better? Can you really smell the grass, Tom? Barf. Hall and Garfinkel are dreaming if they think their initiatives have brought the game closer to fans. The commercial audio onslaught, every half inning, singlehandedly mires Chase as an unusually cheesy MLB experience. Everyone I know talks about it. One crass distraction after another, bludgeoning fans away from Tommy’s pungent green grass. The definition of “carnival”…and, if I do say so, some hypocrisy.

We were 28th out of 30 in merchandise sales because nobody wanted to wear the colors, Hall says a bit defensively.

Nobody wanted to wear the colors because nobody wanted to come to your games, and nobody wanted to come to your games because:

a) your team stunk (a function of both regimes)
b) your prices were out of touch with market and product quality (after the 04 crisis), and
c) fans developed an immediate and ongoing impression your bosses were insensitive jerks.

Purple unpopular with men? Tell it to Viking or Laker fans. Or LSU or the Ravens. Yeah, what a bunch of fems. Completely rebranding the Valley’s only championship brand is what’s “unpopular”. The fact merchandise sales or attendance crept up since The Stain doesnt imply causality – plenty of other factors easily explain those increases. It’s true young people tend to like it. My son has a bunch of red shirts (and I still dont charge him rent). But the change pissed off older fans, injecting mercantile transience to a storied American franchise (MLB, not AZ) famous for continuity – in a very transient market yearning for permanance.

(Hall estimates he responded to 1,000 angry calls and e-mails about the new uniforms.) “After we made the change, we jumped five slots in six months.”

Well, no kidding. People who want the old stuff already have it (for the most part) and others who want the new stuff, dont. Plus, the team went from last to first in the standings during The Restain. I’m sure that had nothing to do with the jump from 28th to 23rd. [eyeroll]

…the decision to send out season ticket renewal notices in August last year instead of November. “We got lucky with the timing,” Hall acknowledges. Another bit of serendipity was the 2007 sale of TV rights to Fox Sports Net Arizona for $250 million over eight years.

More examples where Derrick comes across well personally, reluctant to grab credit for lucrative moves, yet both begging a question more fundamental to his purported job #1: Is it good for the fans? The first suggests people locked into ST packages they subsequently couldnt afford. Is the jump to FOX cable good for fans? I’d say reaction is quite mixed.

Part of Hall’s worry stems from his deep knowledge of the Phoenix marketplace. The rest of the country may think of the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale area as nouveau riche, but that’s a misconception. Phoenix actually has the lowest per capita income, $35,010, of any MLB city…

This echoes my original research (down to the identical source, USBoEA), so it’s gratifying to see this referenced recently in two natl publications. As for DH’s “deep knowledge” of the Phoenix marketplace, Derrick related to me last March (3/2008) he was “surprised” to read this same information in my blog. I genuinely appreciated his candor, but make of that what you will.

Worried about losing the lower- and middle-income fan, the Diamondbacks now sell upper-deck tickets for as little as $5.

Gotta laugh. Jerry priced these at $1-$5 during the best and worst of times, K&M came in, raised them to $10 and got nothing. Now they’re back to $5 (for non-premier games) and they’re working class heroes all of a sudden, all “worried” about low end affordability. Cant make this stuff up :-)
 
Hall also instituted “kids’ pricing” for concessions – $1.50 for a hot dog or popcorn or milk, etc.

And it took the better part of a year between the time he started crowing about it on TV, until the time Levy’s actually put the reduced prices on their menus.

Too often, this appears to be Derrick’s MO. Oversell, fudge, mislead to the general public – if fussy individuals object, smile and bend over backwards, invite them to lunch and pretend that addresses the general transgression. It’s an old sales trick. Then commit the same transgression tomorrow, without blinking an eye, and start making new “friends”. PT Barnum is an apt comparison. He worked like hell too, tightroping the fine wire between wowing and fooling customers, with bells and whistles and carefully crafted language. He and Derrick are a couple of masters :-)

I’d hate to be an owner of a team. Owning a professional sports team is the only “business” where you’re ridiculed for trying to make a profit. Maybe if we all had a financial stake in the team to go along with our emotional one, we’d all understand what owner x is going through.

Found this on the azcentral boards. The piece was talking about Sarver specifically, but can be applied to all of them. The intent of posting this was not to keep picking at old wounds or anything. Just seemed to go with a post i made a few days ago.

“It doesn’t matter what sport it is. It doesn’t matter what venue it is. Attendance is going to suffer and that’s the bottom line if you want to be honest about it,” Diamondbacks pitcher Doug Davis said.

“You see Walt Disney commercials on all the time trying to get people to go to their theme parks. People can’t afford it. That’s it. So yes, attendance is going to be down. Not only here, but around the whole continental U.S. And it’s going to hurt everybody, not just baseball. It already is.”

http://www.azcentral.com/sports/heatindex/articles/2009/02/22/20090222spt-p2mainmac.html