Obligatory Harry Potter Post: “The Harry Potter Effect” on Baseball

Posted by Paul Moro on Thursday July 26th 2007, 1:19 pm - filed in News reel

I’m an unapologetic Harry Potter fan.  Judge me if you must, but know that I’m a much happier person than you because of this. So when “The-Boy-Who-Lived” and baseball collide, I have to post.

J.C. Bradbury, the author of “The Baseball Economist” and fellow Potter fan, looks at MLB’s attendance figures from this past Saturday wondering on his blog if Saturday’s release of the seventh and final Potter book, “The Deathly Hallows”, had any effect on how many people went to a big league game. His findings? Little to no impact.

 Harry Potter cost teams an average of 418 fans per game—a total of 6,270 fans. Using average ticket prices this translates to about $138,000 in lost gate revenue. Add in concessions and the losses are still small.

He does ultimately hypothesize that there probably was a bigger impact on the number of those who watched these games on television (I definitely did nothing else in my spare time on Saturday than to read through 3/4 of the book), but even still there’s a part of me that wanted to see a bigger legion of baseball/Potter fans. 

Now I feel lonely.  


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Tagged:  Harry-Potter, J.C.-Bradbury

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