Published in The Great North Arrow, November 1, 2025: My 70¢ Worth On Baseball

My 70¢ Worth On Baseball

- jim Young

“Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd;

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don’t care if I never get back.” - Jack Norworth & Albert Von Tilzer

The cost of going to a ball game in 1908 when this song was written was between 10¢ and 25¢. A box of Cracker Jack was 5¢. A bottle of Coke was the same. For a total of 70¢, you could afford pretty good seats to take your date to the ball game and spoil her with some refreshments.

Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $25 in today’s money.. But even double that will only get you a single ticket for a regular season baseball game today; never mind a date or any refreshments.

And forget about the World Series where ticket prices can easily range from $1,500 to $7,000 Cdn each (PLUS taxes).

Or you could book a room with a stadium view at Rogers Centre for about 10 grand and split the cost with 5 friends. That’s only 2 grand each but only 4 people can spend the night so you’ll have to draw straws to see who goes home after the game.

Compared to other seats you might get for 2 grand each, the view isn’t that great but you do have the advantage of also watching it up close on the TV in the room simultaneously. And with the bed nearby you can always take a nap if you find it’s taking Alejandro Kirk too long to run the bases after hitting the ball out of the park.

You can leave your baseball glove at home though, because there’s not much chance that even Vladdy’s going to hit a ball through the open window into your room.

With 55 rooms that are sometimes sold out for events like the World Series, that’s a potential revenue of well over ½ million dollars for just 1 game.

But let’s just look at the average ticket price for a regular Blue Jays game which Statista reported was $46.40 CDN for 2024.

The average Blue Jays game attendance for 2024 was 33,102.

The cheapest beer at Rogers Stadium will cost you $6.50 plus tax and tips but they are only available in some sections. Elsewhere you’ll pay up to $18 (plus tax and tips) for a cold brewski.

Except for “Loonie Dog Nights” a hot dog will cost anywhere from $3.50 to $13.00 each.

So a cheap night at the ball game with a cheap beer and a cheap hot dog at Rogers Stadium to watch the Blue Jays will cost you $57.25 (if you don’t tip) or double that ($114.50) if you can find a cheap date that doesn’t mind going out with a cheapskate. But I wouldn’t count on getting lucky after the game.

That also doesn’t include transportation to and from the game or parking. Nor does it cover a Blue Jays hat or a George Springer jersey. That alone could cost you as much as a ticket to get in. What if your date wants a foam finger to show her support for the home team? There’s the price of another ticket and you’re probably still not getting lucky.

And speaking of getting lucky, 50-50 tickets will run you anywhere from $10 to $200 in lot sizes ranging from 5 to 600 tickets. $10 million was won by Blue Jays fans in 2024 which means that $20 million was spent on tickets.

Admittedly your expenditure of 70¢ in 1908 may not have gotten you lucky either, but that had more to do with societal morals of the time than it did with your willingness to flash that kind of money around.

Okay, the cost of your divorce and job when your wife and boss catch you kissing your cheap date on the kiss cam may be remote so we will ignore those costs for now. But it has happened.

Still, with an average attendance of 33,102, at the very, very minimum, that’s about $1.9 million that Canadians spend to watch one Blue Jays home game. And I guarantee you, most fans aren’t that cheap. Multiply that by 81 home games and that’s almost $154 million just for the regular season.

Imagine how that base number multiplies exponentially when the Jays make the post season and go on to the World Series like they did this year!

Of course not everyone can afford to go to the ball game but there are still many more dollars spent at home or at the bars watching the game with beer, pizza and wings. And then there’s the bets on the games whether it’s online or in workplace pools. 

And that’s just baseball. What about the other four big sports games? Hockey, football, basketball and soccer. How much money is being spent on those?

There may be a lot of factors involved in determining the welfare of our economy, but every time I watch a baseball game and see the seats of the stadiums filled almost to capacity and knowing how much those seats cost and the related expenditures, I have to question how bad things really are.  

Don’t get me wrong. I am sympathetic for all those people who are struggling to make ends meet. Too many older people are finding their pension cheques aren’t sufficient to cover their basic groceries. Too many younger people can’t find adequate, affordable housing and too many people in general just don’t have enough hours to work the number of jobs they need to get by.

But maybe it’s not our economy that’s to blame. Maybe, just maybe it has more to do with the distribution of wealth. Because it seems to me that there’s a lot of people in Canada spending a lot of money on sports. And I’ll bet most of them are getting lucky after the games too - especially when the Blue Jays win!

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