As far as Craig Carton is concerned, there aren’t a lot of people calling baseball games that truly understand what the sport means to most of the people in the stands. On Wednesday’s edition of Carton & Roberts on WFAN, he and Evan Roberts were talking about the fact that he had never met either Gary Cohn or Suzyn Waldman.
Evan Roberts jokes that maybe Carton needed to get out more and find a way to be in the same room with the respective Mets and Yankees broadcasters.
“Trust me, I used to be out enough,” Carton laughed, a reference to his gambling addiction and legal troubles. “I was out enough for many lifetimes. That’s why I go straight home now from work.”
He then added that it would be hard to figure out how to meet either broadcaster because they aren’t easily accessible at games.
According to Craig Carton, that isn’t a problem that is exclusive to Cohn and Waldman. He wondered if it is possible for the people calling the games on TV and radio to love the sport the way their audience does.
“I always say, like when you become a play-by-play broadcaster, now, I can’t speak to when you were a kid obviously. You probably bought a ticket to a game or your old man did or something like that. You’ve lost touch with the average fan, because you get paid to go to games. You have no idea what it’s like to want to buy a ticket to Yoda bobblehead (night) because they just give you a Yoda bobblehead.”
In 2021, according to Statista, the average price of a ticket to a Major League Baseball game was over $34. The site also reports that ticket prices in New York are significantly higher, with Yankee fans paying $145 per ticket on average and Mets fans paying $64 per ticket on average.
Carton is likely on to something when it comes to the disconnect. While play-by-play announcers and analysts are likely aware that it isn’t cheap for one person, let alone a family of four to attend a game in person, they may not understand just how expensive it actually is.
