Drunkenness at Baseball Stadiums – The Downside of Baseball and Beer

In this feature on baseball scoreboards, I will examine the impact of alcohol sales on fans at baseball stadiums.

If you’ve bought tickets to a baseball game, they will probably come with the assumption that you will be drinking alcohol there. Beer has become as an essential part of watching baseball as the baseball scoreboards themselves. But many fans of the game that are not huge fans of alcohol are beginning to complain. The public drunkenness is starting to get out of hand, with swearing, throwing things and even fist fights erupting.

A lot of research has been conducted on drunkenness in baseball stadiums, and it has come up with the following conclusions: 1) The authorities are doing a poor job at enforcing the guidelines and laws at stadiums. As part of the research, undercover people pretended to be drunk and 74 percent of them were still served booze, and it was more likely for them to be sold it by a vendor at the stands. 2) Thousands of people are drunk when they leave the game, and they drive drunk. By stopping random cars and giving breathalyzer tests, the researchers found that at least 8 percent of the fans going home were way over the limit.

Other research conducted at the University of Minnesota discovered that most local law-enforcement agencies received complaints they described as “frequent” regarding fights that were going on either outside or inside the arenas and stadiums they patrolled. Most of these brawls were alcohol-related. They claimed that such complaints were quite common and admitted that practices of law enforcement in this regard are rather limited.

But in spite of the fact that there is a proven link between alcohol and intoxication-related problems that follow, it is virtually impossible to eliminate alcohol from baseball stadiums. The main reason is that key sponsors of baseball games are beer manufacturers! Just look at the names: Denver’s Coors Field, Milwaukee’s Miller Park, St. Louis’ Busch Stadium… So, despite the drunken brawls and the boorish behavior, it doesn’t seem like alcohol is going to be leaving baseball stadiums any time soon. Baseball and beer go hand in hand like a happy couple and as long as they continue to do so, drunkenness-related incidents are bound to continue.

The bottom line is that teams are sponsored way too much by alcohol (especially beer) manufacturers. These companies poor a lot of money into the game, so serving their product is a natural component of the deal. So, everything boils down to money. For as long as teams and stadiums continue to profit from the sales of alcohol, it will most certainly be served at baseball games. To attack this problem at its core, the teams would have to find other sponsors. But beer fans probably wouldn’t be too happy about that.