Brand-New Ballgame

This is part of Pour One Out, a series about what’s happening to America’s famous appetite for suds—and what’s taking its place.

Ever since college, I’ve been a part-time beer vendor at Wrigley Field in Chicago. You can hardly ask for a better way to spend the summer than slinging 16-ounce domestic macrobrews to thousands of sports fans in one of baseball’s most historic stadiums. I’ve worked World Series games on both sides of town, caught countless exciting baseball moments, and once carded American Pie’s Thomas Ian Nicholas because I wasn’t sure if he was over 35. Plus, after 20-plus years in the job, I’ve basically memorized every single word of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Beer vending is fun and educational!

But the lived experience of beer vending—seeing games, being a ballpark “character,” building meaningful work friendships with various ushers—is a separate thing from the business of beer vending, i.e., how many beers I can sell on any given game day. While some Wrigley vendors maintain that the beer-vending business has been in a steady decline since the days of Herman Franks, this standpoint is more of a generally grumbly life outlook than a matter of empirical fact. According to the meticulous personal records I’ve kept since 2016, my sales numbers have remained pretty consistent from year to year. Sure, some games are much better than others—people drink more when the weather is warm and the Cubs are winning than they do when it’s cold and they’re losing—but over the long term, the job is a very good one and has stayed good ever since I’ve been keeping track.

And yet, early data from the 2023 baseball season-in-progress indicates that this year might actually mark a downturn for baseball-stadium beer vending. I’ve worked slightly less than one-third of the Cubs’ home games thus far, and I can report that my per-game beer sales numbers this year are lower than they’ve been over the past few years. In 2022, for instance, I averaged approximately 5.25 cases of beer sold per game. So far this year, I’m averaging 4.37 cases of beer sold per game—a palpable decline, if not a financially ruinous one. Why am I selling less beer this year than I’ve sold in years past? Not that you asked, but I have some theories.

Theory 1: The games are shorter this year, which means less time for beer drinking.

This is the Occam’s razor explanation for why I’m selling fewer beers than ever. When Major League Baseball announced that it would institute a pitch clock for the 2023 baseball season, the idea was to speed up the pace of play by penalizing players for lollygagging before at-bats and between pitches. This innovation has done wonders for making baseball a more engaging spectator sport. Now that the players are disincentivized from endlessly manhandling the rosin bag or loitering outside the batter’s box to enjoy two full verses plus the chorus of their walk-up song, I’ve found this year’s games to be tauter and more entertaining than they’ve been in years.

They’re also consistently shorter. During the 2022 baseball season, the Cubs played 16 total games that clocked in at 2:40 or shorter. Just over halfway into the 2023 season, they’ve already played more than three dozen games in 2:40 or shorter, 18 of which have been played at home. I “crunched” some “numbers” I got from the invaluable website Baseball Reference and found that, for the Cubs’ first 43 home games this year, the average game time was 2:42. Across the Cubs’ first 43 home games of 2022, the average game time was 3:07. That’s a 25-minute-per-game difference from 2022 to 2023—or, to put it another way, roughly the amount of time it takes a motivated group of Wrigley patrons to finish one round of beers and resolve to order another.*

Would I be willing to swear in court that my sales dip is a direct result of the shorter game times? No, and I cannot envision a situation in which I would have to. But it’s still pretty clear to me that shorter games mean that spectators have less time to purchase and drink beer. On an average game day, I can sell a little bit less than a case of beer in half an hour. Lo and behold, my per-game average is down by a little bit less than a case this year. Correlation? Certainly. Causation? Not necessarily.

Theory 2: Beers keep getting more expensive.

Yes, this is true, but so does everything else. Prices go up over time. When I first started selling beer at Wrigley Field over 20 years ago, if memory serves, a 16-ounce can went for $4.75. Today, if you buy a canned beer in the stands at a Cubs game, it’ll cost you either $12 or $13 plus tax. Customers will sometimes gripe to me about being asked to pay as much for a single beer at Wrigley as they’d pay for a six-pack of that same beer at a gas station. I try to remind them that they can’t watch a baseball game at a gas station unless they somehow figure out how to change the channel on those stupid little TVs they have at the pump. Moved by my unassailable logic, people generally buy the beer anyway, and then we all move on and stop talking about gas stations.

But while people can justify paying six-pack prices for one or two rounds of beer, in my experience they’re a bit more reluctant these days to do so for three or more rounds. According to my very, very anecdotal data, at its current price point, the third round is where demand for beer at the ballgame now becomes elastic—where people start to weigh the costs and benefits of the purchase against the other things they might do with that money, such as fill up their car at the gas station.

Theory 3: Sales are tied to weather and attendance.

“Cold enough for you?” I joked before a recent game to one of the jovial ushers stationed in the left field boxes. The weather was, indeed, cold enough for him, and also for me and everyone else who was confused to be experiencing 55-degree temperatures at a Cubs game in mid-June. That’s just how this year has gone thus far, though. The average game-time temperature of the games I’ve worked thus far this year is 64.7 degrees, which does not really track with what people refer to as “baseball weather.” The average home-game attendance of the games I’ve worked this year, meanwhile, is 35,343, in a park that seats 41,649 people. (I had other obligations and was unable to work the Cubs’ most recent six-game homestand, which featured two long rain delays and at least two games played in poor air-quality conditions.)

In other words, the Cubs have not yet hit their peak summer season in terms of attendance, while the weather has not brought the sorts of balmy days that are ideal for beer drinking (and selling). It’ll get warmer this month and August, but it’ll also start to get humid, which can easily cancel out the sales bump that can accompany higher temperatures. What you want is a day that’s warm—between 75 and 85 degrees will do—breezy, and dry, the sort of weather that automatically puts fans in good moods and dissuades people like me from annoying Wrigley’s hardworking ushers with jokey weather clichés.

Theory 4: The beer I sell does not come in little plastic baseball bats.

Way, way back in the day, a Cubs fan at Wrigley had basically two choices: Buy a Bud or an Old Style from a beer vendor, or go wait in a long line to buy a Bud or an Old Style from a stand. While these days the vendors still sell a limited range of beers, the range of beverage options available elsewhere at Wrigley Field has significantly expanded. You can get all sorts of microbrews and imports now from a bunch of different stands, and also mixed drinks and margaritas and other concoctions, and some of these beers are served in novelty souvenir glasses that resemble a hollow baseball bat. (Beer as a category is facing similar headwinds from new competition, the subject of Slate’s series.) All other things being equal, I guess I, too, would prefer to drink a beer out of a hollow plastic bat than out of a boring old can.

Theory 5: I have gotten worse at beer vending.

I don’t think this is true, but you never know! When contemplating why, exactly, my sales numbers are down this year, I must account for the possibility that I myself am the problem—that my technique has declined, or that I’ve gotten slower, or that the fans en masse have gotten together and decided that they don’t like me, in the style of junior-high lunchrooms. Sometimes, when I hit a slow patch, I’ll look around and see other vendors blithely making sales, and I’ll get a little depressed and wonder: Is it me? Am I the problem? Maybe I am! If you’ve seen me at a game this year and would be willing to share your opinion on whether or not I stink at beer vending now, please reach out.

Theory 6: It’s just a small sample size, and my numbers will revert to form by the end of the year.

Here’s hoping that this theory is the actual explanation for what’s happening, and that it isn’t that the fans are all talking about me behind my back, because that would be pretty devastating if it were true.