… I remain one during it, and I’ll still be one when we recover.

I embrace free radio broadcasts of games, FREE KRAUT on smuggled-in dogs at whatever facility the A’s play their home games, gray-market below-face or mooched free tickets, and BART bridge/kludged merch over officially licensed swag. I grudgingly pay my cable bill and subscribe to MLB audio because (a) we live in the shadow of a big hill in an old building, (b) Wolffisher won’t sign to a deal with a broadcaster with a stronger signal than a homemade crystal set, and © MLB audio is actually a pretty sweet bargain.

So long as other suckers keep paying premium prices for seats ‘n’ swag, I have zero objections to players getting their fair share of the owners’ profits.

My particular brand of fandom is (relatively) recession-proof.

Word on the street is that the AN retroactive subscription notices with amounts past due will be in the mail before xmas.

I, and a lot of people I know, are fortunate enough to still be employed, but since it seems companies are not hiring even when there is a need, instead relying on current employees to do more, our jobs have gotten harder and resulted in longer hours. That’s going to be the biggest factor in making it to games for me; it was hard enough to get out of work in time to make an evening game last year, and this year it’ll be even harder.

I’m having a little trouble convincing my season ticket buddy to buy now, but that may come around closer to the season. I want to do it because we’ll end up going to almost as many games anyway, and it’s a better deal to have the season tickets….we’ll see…

I will continue to buy my full-season single seat in 117, but I will be actively seeking someone to share it with me. Ideally I’ll find someone to split it 50/50. In the past I’ve gone to 50-60 games a year, but this year I will be happy with fewer games if I can find someone to share the financial burden. I do buy the VIP parking because the closest BART station to my home is Coliseum. It comes out to $8-9 per game, which is still almost half of what they charge for regular parking.

my friends and i will normally splash out for proper good seats a few times a year, but them aside, it’s mostly the cheap seats. bart is cheap, bringing your own beverages is cheap, and for three hours of entertainment (or, rather, a half hour’s entertainment if things go poorly), it’s pretty good value.

i agree regarding the mlb audio package, incidentally – i got it this year for the first time, and it got me through five months of extreme work tedium at a low low price. brilliant!

something that may or may not be interesting – when my friends come to visit from overseas, i try to take them to a baseball game (sometimes it has to be the giants due to scheduling concerns, obviously), and they are always amazed by what a good deal it is – if i wanted, for example, to go see a Premiership Football game in England, i’d be looking at around $150 dollars for a pair of tickets. I always feel it’s great that we’re able to see top flight sports (well, most of the time) for $15+ a ticket.

beer prices are comparable, mind.

I’ve had a 22-game field-level plan since 2004, five seasons worth. My game partners- niece, her husband, and their son- have bowed out for ‘09. The A’s have a rep who e-mails me almost daily with enticing game plans. I’m just not sure I can do it next year, although I probably say that every year. Finding someone to go with may prove to be my bigger challenge.

Broke college student, if I can find a job, I’ll probably get the Extra Innings package (I don’t have TV, and even if I did, I live on the other side of the country) or MLB audio. Depends on WAY too many factors to tell.

I really, really don’t know right now though. Depends on so many things, like a job and my ability/propensity to quit smoking (most.expensive.habit/reliance.ever).

If I don’t get a job, I probably will get neither.

As a fan from outside of the Oakland area (Pismo Beach area). It takes me about three and a half hours to drive each way to reach Oakland from Pismo. That means that I usually stay the night and hit up two weekend games to make the seven hours driving worth the trip.

Throw in the gas money, the stay in a respectable hotel, good to very good seats for two games(why go through all the trouble to sit in average to poor seats?), the parking and the beer and food(once you do the drive you would like to be entertained with some good eats and quality beer). You are talking about a pretty expensive trip. That kind of money can go towards a trip to Mexico, Vegas or many of the other places I enjoy.

As a fairly affluent bachelor with quite a bit of expendable income, I make it a priority to travel and vacation 3-4 times a year. I do have to ask myself if The Oakland coliseum is the place that I want to spend those hard earned dollars right now. I’m a diehard A’s fan and I will always watch them, it just might be from a Vegas bar or on my computer in Mexico, maybe I just want the best of both worlds as cash becomes king. Everything else in this country is losing or has lost value. It would be very hard, if not impossible to get me to pay MORE for a sporting event in this economic climate.

There was an SF Gate article about Giants doing different pricing for games depending on popularity – variable ticket pricing .
Baseball, A’s baseball, is where my heart is and so that’s usually where I spend my money..spring training, weekend season tickets, roadtrips when possible. And I am very fortunate to have friends who take me out to the ballgame.
I probably will bring food to the game, rather than eat there, to save some money..but I definitely plan to be at the ballpark as much as possible.

Damn economy.

Of course it helps to be 4 1/2 hours away from the nearest MLB team. We’ll probably still go to a few Durham Bulls games like every year. Barring something bad happening with our personal finances, I still plan on getting MLB Extra Innings.

When the economy is in the tank, big-ticket travel is certain to suffer. I’ve been planning on a 2009 spring training trip, but I definitely need to do some budget slashing and the cost/benefit of a few days in Phoenix is looking pretty dubious. We’ll see how things look in the middle of February.

The thing that will save Phoenix’s baseball-oriented tourist economy this year will be the arrival of the Dodgers. Especially if gas stays below $2 into March.

Seattle hasn’t been hit too hard as of yet (knock on wood of course) and I’m actually in a better economic situation than I was this time last year. Still, despite the fact that I feel fairly secure in my job and and pretty optimistic that I’ll be able to weather the storm, this entire episode has made me take stock of a lot my financial situation, spending habits, etc. I decided that I was spending too much money on certain things (car, convenience food, that sort of thing) and not nearly enough money on others. Baseball was one of those things.

Despite living in Seattle, I only make it out to three or four games a year. Part of that is my work schedule; I’m usually off at 7:30, so getting out to games isn’t really feasible five days a week. Part of that is Seattle’s appallingly awful transit system. The biggest factor, though, is my own laziness. I just need to make time to get out to the stadium. I’m happiest when I’m at Safeco and watching live rock and roll, and I’ve made it my goal to do both of those things much more often in the coming months.

So, in a weird way, the economic crisis will most likely cause me to spend more money on baseball this year. I realized that I was taking my ability to go to games whenever I wanted for granted, and that in terms of my own personal happiness/well being, it’s well worth the investment. And now that I’m moving to within a mile of Safeco, it should give me even more of an excuse to spend a night at the park.

As far as the issue of resentment? Not really. Are the salaries paid to baseball players indicative of the fact that our society has its values way out of whack? Yeah, probably. But I think there are far more pressing issues at hand. Baseball is still absurdly profitable. The league makes money, the teams make money and no matter how bad the economy gets, people will keep coming to games. It’s hard to go any further down this road without taking things into political territory, but I’ll say this; as long as CEOs of companies that are laying off thousands of workers and/or closing up shop altogether are taking gigantic bonuses, I find it misguided to be angry at baseball players. Their industry is still viable and profitable, so why shouldn’t they reap the benefits?