Dodger Blogger Night – Stan Kasten Q&A
The second part of Dodgers Blogger Night was a Q&A with Dodgers President Stan Kasten. Again the answers are very loose and I jotted them down. Excuse the format. For the Ned Colleti Q&A click <<Here>>
Stan Kasten said in Washington they were one of first team to allow access to bloggers.
Has not given any thoughts to what might be developed around Dodger Stadium. No plan right now.
Frustrated about traffic to stadium, so much of it is out of hands. We are not near public transpiration, or a train stop or convenient bus stop. The bus shuttle we have does not have a dedicated lane. Has talked to people in city government and parking consultants. They have tried a new procedure called In and Out solution, they have ambassadors that are stained 10 cars out at every line to answer questions before they get to the booth. That’s a lot of the hold up because people ask questions, where do I go? How much do I pay? They tried to answer those questions six cars out and it did shave some tie off the entrance.
As far as stuff as change to design, that’s an off-season thing, trying to fix problems that have been with us for 50 years.
This is the best stadium ever designed to watch baseball, but lets face it we don’t have the modern amenities. Kids areas, restaurant/Bars, gathering places, interactive areas and we don’t have history display. We have one entire concourse of archived stuff but no history display. I find that interesting. In the enhancements that they envision they are trying to do all those things in one form or another. He doesn’t know if they can do them all in time for next season, but they are on the drawing board. That will make the fans happy, more to do and a better time here. We need to do these things just like every new ballpark has.
We can do variations of all these things here with out affecting the overall look. They have hired designers, they will announce in the next week or two who these people are.
Asked about better Wi-Fi at the stadium – Before they can make enhancements they need to maintain the park. The needs here are very pressing, power, water, and information systems, Wi-Fi, cell service, etc. Powers, water in many respects are original wiring. Its phenomenal that it has lasted this long. We have real critical needs. Information systems is a term that didn’t even exist when this ballpark opened.
We are working on it, we are talking to several providers that will allow us to do that. It’s a problem everywhere when you have this many people in a small area. We think we found a solution, we think we have a provider that can do the construction. It’s a 6-month build. We are working to get that done and if we do it soon enough like we think we will it will be done by opening day.
The bad Wi-Fi limits Dodgers from doing e-commerce from the seats, limits security cameras, limits all these things, it’s a high priority
They haven’t begun process on if season tickets for next year will be the same. Since new ownership has come in they have added almost 4000 more season ticket holders and continues to grow. Attendance id up over 5000 a night than this time last year. The trend is good, product of a great team.
Dynamic pricing – there are teams right now at the forefront of experiments and when it gets right, we will be right behind it. We are waiting to see who has figured it out the best.
How do they attract sponsors? – We need 2 million, 3 million, 4 million people and dodo that I need to appeal to all kinds of fans, not just avid fans. I need everyone to feel welcome here. Avid fans, new fans, seniors, Ethnic groups, women, all of them. We try and hit many sponsors, what they are looking for. Lexus is a premium brand and many of their customers are customers of the dugout club. Economics obviously is a factor there. We might have a different demographic for other areas of the ballpark as we build out other areas. We can hit many kinds of groups.
Relationship with Ned and how it works at trade deadline? – He is still learning all aspects of operations, in a normal year he spends about 30% of his time dealing with baseball operations, whether its here or on the road or minors. He talks to Ned everyday. This time of year they talk all day, all night. He keeps him up to date and bouncing ideas off of him. At the end of the day he will ask for his recommendation after he goes through his process with all of his analysts and all of his scouts recommendations. Ned does need approval because everything nowadays has an economical component, but says he can count the times he has vetoed a GM on one hand. He doesn’t call him and say I’m doing this, it’s always something that hey have been discussing for last week or month. It’s never Stan I’m going to do this with no advanced warning, which just doesn’t happen.
Dodgers only network? – Great relationship with Fox. Exclusive negotiating till November. If they leave Fox they should know by end of year. It’s not for 2012 season but for 2013. Hoping it will be a lot of money, more than you think.
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