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October 19, 1980 Kansas City Royals owner Ewing Kauffman has taken what is believed to be the unprecedented step of putting a ceiling on the number of season tickets the team will sell for next year. Kauffman said Sunday he will limit season tickets to 15,000 because he wants to continue to be able to offer tickets for postseason playoffs games to fans who don’t buy season tickets. The team now guarantees season ticketholders one seat at each postseason contest for each season ticket held.
With nearly 12,500 season tickets, that leaves few seats open to the general public during postseason play after the media, Royals players, and the visiting team are allotted their shares. Royals Stadium, one of the smallest major league parks in the country, has just 40,628 seats. Kauffman issued the 15,000ticket limit when he called his office from Philadelphia, where he was attending the first two games of the Royals’ World Series matchup with the Phillies. He learned there had already been 1,000 new applications for season tickets for next year, in addition to the expected 12,500 renewals.
“It’s the first time ever, I think. We’re the only baseball club in the United States to have that situation.” Kauffman said before Royals Stadium was opened in 1973, “I never believed we would sell the number of season tickets that we sold, or that Kansas City would draw 2,300,000-plus fans (in a season), because only 1.7 million people Jive within 50 miles of this stadium. If New York or Los Angeles drew that percentage of their populations, they’d draw 20 million a year.
This is the smallest of the major league cities, yet we’re fourth or fifth in attendance.” The stadium was originally planned for 50,000 seats, but money ran short, and a labor strike delayed construction, and plans were cut to the current figure, he said. To add seats now – the most likely way would be by extending the stadium’s upper deck – would cost a minimum of $10 million, and that wouldn’t be “economically wise,” Kauffman said. “By keeping it this way, there are two factors in our favor,” he said. “First, the more difficult it is to get something, the more people want it. By knowing that the tickets will be hard to get sometimes, there will be more of a demand for them. Secondly, it’s a more intimate park the way it is.”
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