Bichette's hot bat keeps Jays in the dog days of summer conversation
Credit to Author: Gord Kurenoff| Date: Fri, 09 Aug 2019 21:44:24 +0000
Consider the commotion that Bo Bichette has caused in the two weeks that he’s gone from the Buffalo Bisons of triple-A baseball to join fellow up-and-comers Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Cavan Biggio as the anchors of the next generation of the Toronto Blue Jays.
Imagine what the impact would be if the Jays were a contending team and not an also ran that is playing below .400l, 30½ games behind the American League East-leading New York Yankees and saddled with the fifth-worst record in Major League Baseball.
Bichette and his aggressive swing are in virgin territory. He has hit safely in the first 11 games of his career, which is a franchise record. He has doubled in a MLB-record nine consecutive games. He has four home runs in the first two weeks of his big-league career.
Bo Bichette of the Toronto Blue Jays has enjoyed an historic start to his big-league career. (Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)
No player in baseball history has enjoyed the kind of start that the son of former four-time all-star and Silver Slugger Dante Bichette has had. Not one.
His historic performance has made the Blue Jays the most-followed non-factor in MLB during these dog days of summer. His team is toast and the last remnants of the 2015-16 AL Championship Series finalists are now fully-dismantled in the aftermath of last week’s trades of Marcus Stroman, Aaron Sanchez and Joe Biagini.
Yet Bichette is making his every at bat worth waiting for and he’s caused a notable spike in scoreboard watching, TV and radio audiences along with social media traffic.
It will end and he’ll cool off. But no one will ever be able to take away one of the most bullish debuts in MLB history.
In one of the most inane examples of out-of-touch ticket pricing in recent memory, the upcoming NFL pre-season exhibition between the Green Bay Packers and Oakland Raiders at Investors Group Field in Winnipeg is making headlines for all of the wrong reasons.
With remaining ticket prices starting at $191.50 for a game that won’t count in any standings, the Packers-Raiders’ tilt is shaping up as the biggest dud of the summer. On current tracking, it will draw 27 per cent capacity and a sparse crowd of 8,900 at the home of the CFL’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers, who habitually drive 25K per game (or three times what the NFL game is projecting).
When you don’t sell out, it’s most often the ticket pricing that makes it so. Whenever you promote an NFL game between two of the most-storied franchises and heritage brands in professional football and you get to less than half-full, you have no one to blame but yourself.
The rule of thumb in the business of ticket-selling is simple: Do whatever you can to put bums in seats. That begins with reasonable ticket pricing. A sellout of 30,000 plus at one-third the average ticket price they settled on would have been the right formula, especially given the additional revenue streams that would have driven in terms of concessions, merchandising and ancillary fees such as parking.
It is almost as boneheaded as the ticket gouging that accompanied the launch of the Buffalo Bills’ Toronto series (2008-2013). That series of exhibition and regular-season games never fully recovered from that disastrous and distasteful disconnect out of the gates.
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