NEWS
Take me out to the ballgame
Posted: Saturday, September 09, 2000
A visit to Chicago's Wrigley Field prompts some thoughts on marketing horse racing
New friends, intent on showing off Chicago to recent arrivals, treated for an evening of baseball at a Windy City shrine, Wrigley Field.
This was a warm Tuesday night in late August, but Wrigley's fabled 30-mile-per-hour wind howled off Lake Michigan and cast a foggy chill over the ballpark. The Chicago Cubs, the team that occupies Wrigley, are sleepwalking to the end of the season, and the previously mentioned zephyr from center field eliminated any chance of seeing a Sammy Sosa home run.
So, here's the scene. The ballpark is located in an urban neighborhood where parking is well-nigh impossible, the Cubs are 17 games behind the division leader, and they are playing the San Diego Padres, who dwell in their division's cellar. The weather is a bit less than ideal, the game is being played on a Tuesday evening, and Major League Baseball has become morbidly slow. (This game went to 13 innings and lasted more than four hours.) In short, it sounds like a formula for a bad night at the ballpark. But it wasn't.
The place was jumping. The stands were well filled, and the ground-level concourse surrounding the playing field was teeming. The crowd was young and included perhaps more young women than men.
By Wrigley Field standards, it was a bad night. The crowd totaled 31,954, about 7,000 short of capacity. It was the smallest crowd in three months. Chicago is a two-team town, and the White Sox are stumbling to a runaway division championship before a lot of empty seats on the South Side, at a relatively new (1991) Comiskey Park with ample parking. Go figure.
So, what does all this baseball stuff have to do with racing? A lot.
Think back a half-century or so and consider the leading sports in that era.
Baseball was king, and racing-with its legal gambling-was right behind it.
Both sports now are well past their golden ages. Both have aging demographics, and both are slow games when today's sports fans appear to favor fast-paced action. Both sports have repeatedly shot themselves in the foot, baseball with its strikes and racing with crummy customer service. In general, both have long seasons.
Wrigley Field has been transformed beyond a ballpark, however. Built in 1914, it has become an attraction itself, an event. Some newer ballparks, principally Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore and Jacobs Field in Cleveland, have become attractions, but old Wrigley has outdone them all. It has been the single attraction that revitalized an aging urban neighborhood on Chicago's North Side.
Racing has its events, too. Saratoga Race Course is an event, and so is Del Mar.
The Kentucky Derby (G1) is an event, and so is the Breeders' Cup. Regionally, events have been created by racetracks by bunching together stakes programs for one big day, as the Breeders' Cup did on a national scale.
Events build media coverage, attract larger crowds, and expose newcomers to the sport. Perhaps the X Generation and Y Generation members will not become racetrack bettors today, but they may 20 years from now.
To survive, racing needs to take that long-term perspective-as Japanese racing has done by attracting a young crowd to its racecourses.
Racetrack operators in many locales undoubtedly will argue that they are not Wrigley Field, or Saratoga, or Del Mar. True, but with some creativity and some expenditure, every track can create an event and market it. Wrigley, Saratoga, and Del Mar have built-in drawing power, but their operators have exploited their assets to go from being an attraction to being an event.
Churchill Downs has attracted a younger audience with late-afternoon concerts, and Turfway Park this year is greatly expanding its musical offerings for its Kentucky Cup on September 16. Other tracks are doing the same, but the industry could use a marketing agency focused on transforming racing into an event.
As the National Thoroughbred Racing Association merges with Breeders' Cup Ltd., perhaps this is a useful course for an organization that has strayed from its original marketing mandate. With its bright minds, the NTRA should focus on making every day at the racetrack a special one.
Don Clippinger is features editor of Thoroughbred Times.
