Temporary Loge Boxes Find Audience at Minor League Ballparks

Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal 

Stadium construction at the minor league level averaged about $25 million when this column ran, and a traditional enclosed suite elevated above the concourse cost $150,000 to $175,000 a unit. Modular Products, the company Jonathan Cole formed alongside Pendulum, built the alternative: an aluminum loge box with fifteen swivel chairs, a drink rail, buffet space, a mini refrigerator and a roof cover, for $35,000.

The first installation went in midway through the 2009 season at Modern Woodmen Park in Davenport, Iowa, home of the Quad Cities River Bandits, a ballpark Cole knew well because he had been lead designer on its 2004 renovation earlier in his career. The club pulled a thousand bench seats from the top of the third base bleachers and put in four boxes with room for about sixty people. They sold for almost every game.

The economics were the whole point. A loge seat went for $20 a person including food and non alcoholic drinks, against the $5 to $8 the seat it replaced would have brought. Kegs slid into the refrigerators, and the refrigerators could be tied into the ballpark’s point of sale system so the operator could bill by the ounce. The same park later installed 300 feet of drink rail at the top of the outfield berm, and a new park in Winston-Salem put the rails into its premium club.

This is the pro forma argument in its smallest form: change what a seat can earn without rebuilding the building.

Source: “Temporary loge boxes find audience at minor league ballparks”, Breaking Ground by Don Muret, Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal, August 30 to September 5, 2010, page 10.

The framework Pendulum uses to judge a venue as a long term civic and financial system is set out in S.C.O.R.E.