Maybe better management would help

The City and Nationals' management wonder why merchandise and concession sales were lower than expected in the team's first year in Washington, D.C. It doesn't take a genius to understand why.

First, the Nationals did everything they could to depress concession sales. The consessionaire regularly ran out of necessaries even before the game started!! Anyone who went to games could see exasperated fans looking in vain for napkins, mustard, straws, etc. soon after entering the stadium. My favorite example of this incompetence was when the concession stands on the lower level ran out of water early in a game on one of the summer's most oppressively hot and humid days. And the lines at the concession stands were ridiculously long, especially on the upper levels of the stadium. There were two reasons for this: many of the people manning the stands were either embarassingly slow or incompentent or both and there weren't enough outlets for the more popular items. For example, the line for specialty italian sausage dogs was always three times as long as the line for chicken fingers, but the concessionaire never opened additional stands to sell the sausage dogs.

Second, the Nationals did almost no marketing this year. This is, perhaps, not surprising given that the team didn't have a real owner, but the lack of a coherent marketing strategy depressed attendance and interest in the team and, thus, merchandise sales.

Third, it was impossible for most people to watch Nationals' games even when the team was in the thick of the playoff race. This, too, depressed interest in the team. Major League Baseball's decision to give away the team's broadcast rights to Peter Angelos, a person determined to destroy the team, guaranteed that the Nats wouldn't have the most aggressive media strategy. And Angelos' decision to breach his contract with Comcast prevented him from pursuing whatever strategy he had envisioned for Nationals broadcasts. The result was that the only way to watch many games was to buy Direct TV. If you're like us, you've bought cable and high-speed internet access from Comcast and you're not likely to switch to the dish, which means you weren't able to watch most of the team's games down the stretch.

Fourth, the team decided to sell disproportionate numbers of prime seats to politicians, media celebrities, and corporations. The team candidly admitted this before the season started when lots of fans complained about the location of their seats. It's one thing to sell luxury boxes to the star set, but it's quite another to give them prime seats because they're more likely than truly interested fans to be no shows. The Nationals had higher percentages of no shows than most any other team, and this was part of the reason why.

The common thread running through all of these problems is bad management, which will plague the team until it gets a real owner. A new owner needs to install new management, and new management needs to adopt aggressive and coherent media and marketing strategies. That's the only way the team will start to generate additional concession and merchandise revenue. It's too bad that the Nationals couldn't capitalize on the enthusiasm generated by the relocation of the team to Washington, but the team can start to right that wrong this offseason--when it gets a real owner.