Recess #9: Gotta Catch (at) 'Em All!
How many people have visited every MLB stadium, and why is it a popular pursuit?
Back before I migrated all my old blog posts to Substack last year, I wrote an article estimating how many people had been to every state in the United States. This topic recently popped back into my head as I made my first visit to Texas for a weekend of golfing (more on this in the next long-form article). During the trip, I ended up at the Texas Rangers’ new stadium just outside Dallas— not for a baseball game, but for an American Rodeo event. Apart from being awed by the capability and athleticism of the participants, the rodeo’s venue made me think about a twist on the study of “state-hunters”: how many people have been to every MLB stadium in North America? It’s often cited as as bucket list endeavor for many sports enthusiasts, and I think this pursuit has unique appeal for baseball stadiums specifically, due to their high degree of uniqueness.
How many people have actually been to all 50 states?
This article now lives behind the paywall of the past, but TL;DR: I estimated ~70,000 people in all of history have been to every state in the US.
Ironically, in that article (linked above), I suggested that one of the groups of people most likely to visit all 50 states were those trying to see every MLB stadium— and for good reason! As opposed to more standardized venues like NFL arenas or shared NHL/NBA venues, MLB stadiums stand more like golf courses in that they each have their own character and more importantly, unique elements that actually affect play. Individual venues have different outfield geometries, wall heights, foul pole locations, sloped banks, surrounding environments, and more! As someone who self-admittedly loves to collect things, I see the appeal in trying to visit every stadium despite the fact that I don’t particularly love watching baseball for its own sake. Every MLB stadium has some unique character or element that sets it apart from the rest and makes it fun to visit.
The topic of fans visiting every MLB stadium represents a relatively frequent, though not very fan-fared talking point for the media and fans. Everyone from Thrill List to Fox News has published pieces about the hunt for all 30 stadiums and those that seek to complete it. Sometimes avid baseball fans accomplish the feat over multiple decades, and those that combine enough passion with time and money have completed the tour in a single season! The pursuit is so popular that entire retro-style social media sites are dedicated to it, and the MLB has an officially-sanctioned “Pass-Port” that fans can purchase and get official stamps at every stadium like a national park passport! The MLB has leaned into the uniqueness of the hobby within the world of sports, which I think adds even more to its allure.
Unfortunately, none of this really helps us discern how many people have actually accomplished this feat and visited every MLB stadium. Thankfully, we can put on our consulting interviewee hat and leverage the power of basic math and logic to craft such an estimate! Like most great consulting interview questions, we don’t really have a way of validating our answer, but hopefully the math and logic produce an answer that matches our intuitions. One of my best friends once said his ideal “low-grade” super power would be the ability to answer inane quantitative questions like “how many pieces of pizza have I eaten during my whole life” or “how many people in the world can on planes right now” and honestly I wish I had that power for this question specifically.
In absence of a cosmic-radiation or toxic-chemical induced super power trigger, though, let’s jump in with the tools we have!
To start, we need some basic facts and figures about the stadiums themselves. There are currently 30 MLB stadiums spread across the continental United States and southern Canada, though the number of stadiums has increased over time and some have been closed due to franchise “migration.” Regardless, the general concept that one needs to visit at least 22 different cities spread across continental North America has been true since the 1960’s, so for the purposes of this article, we’ll assume that any participants in this challenge did have to visit 30 sites. Thankfully, very few people likely visited even 15-20 stadiums before air travel was democratized as well, even though no one has ever had to make a trip to Hawaii or Alaska for the hunt (although they do need a passport).
You probably need to take at least 40 total flights to visit all the MLB stadiums unless you are doing them all in sequence. The fact that some are co-located in the same city or region won’t help too much from an overall logistics perspective. All the separate trips, tickets, and lodging costs add up quickly too. It’s a pricy task to complete from both a financial, and a time commitment perspective. Perhaps the most unique hurdle that most of the general population needs to clear is that you actually have to be an extremely, extremely avid baseball fan to take on this task in the first place!
According to the MLB, just over 71 Million fans attended a baseball game in person. It’s a slightly crude, but maybe a relatively safe assumption that most fans avid enough to visit all 30 stadiums attend at least one ballgame every year, so can count themselves among this number. It’s been fewer than 60 years since the league expanded to 24 teams, so our requirement of having to visit approximately 30 stadiums also comes into play by removing attendees that could not attend last year because of age. For the level of granularity we want to achieve, this total of 71 million game attendees seems reasonable as a starting pool of prospects.
However, that 71 million attendees does not take into account the fact that many MLB fans watch multiple games per year in person. If the typical MLB fan among this pool sees an average of 1.5 games per season (skewed heavily by season ticket holders and regulars), the actual number of individual people who saw a game in person last season is 71M/1.5, or ~47 Million. To corroborate this rough estimate, I think it’s fair to say maybe 1/4 of sports fans actually see a game in person each year for the pro teams that they support. Forbes estimates that the MLB has ~171 Million total fans, which means that ~43 Million people would see a game each year. If we wanted to average these two methods, let’s say that 45 Million individual fans of every level of dedication see a game in person each year.
Now we need to start narrowing this down to the people with the drive and the means to visit every stadium; the motive and the means, if you will.
A Statista study suggests that ~30% of baseball fans consider themselves “Avid,” which the Forbes article linked above reflects as well. 0.3 x 45M equals a total of ~13.5M “avid” baseball fans. I don’t think I actually know a huge amount of people in the modern social media landscape, but I do know a relatively high amount of “avid” sports fans, and even baseball fans. Not a single one of them has been to more than maybe 15 baseball stadiums. Clearly “avid” is not a term to describe the type of fan that visits all 30 stadiums. I need to coin a new term for the fans dedicated enough that they ascend beyond avidness into a new sect of sports fan. I’ll call them “face-paint fans” for now.
I think face-paint fans are extremely rare, and my very rough estimate is that maybe 1-in-100 people who would consider themselves to be “avid” fans are true face-paint-fans. These are the people that are dedicated enough to their sports and teams of choice to visit every MLB stadium, and applying our avid/face-paint fan ratio to the MLB fandom yields an estimate of just 135,000 people with the drive to actually visit all 30 MLB Stadiums. This is roughly 0.04% of the combined population of the US and Canada, and might honestly be slightly too high. However, let’s assume that 135k is the number of people with the motivation and legitimate interest in the pursuit.
This brings us to the means— the ability to visit all 30 MLB stadiums! In the grand scheme, this is quite an expensive task that I think a low percentage of people could actually accomplish due to a variety of factors, be them monetary or time or life-circumstance related. My rough guess is that maybe only 10-15% of the people in the US and Canada could feasibly visit all 30 stadiums in a lifetime. To be honest, I don’t even know if I could unless I set a lot of other interests and goals aside. Although there might be some correlation between ability to visit 30 stadiums and general baseball fandom, I think it’s fair to apply this ~10% estimate to the MLB fanbase as a whole.
That means…. drum roll…. that I estimate only ~15,000 people have been to every MLB stadium! Or at least, that’s the number of fans that have been to every stadium. We can’t forget the actual players and staff in the league! I think the roughly 20,000 MLB players in history is representative of the total number of players + support staff (coaches, managers, etc.) that could be eligible to visit all MLB stadiums under our rules. Of these team members, I actually bet that maybe only 25% have actually been to every stadium due to short careers and minimal inter-league play?
If that’s true, this would mean that our official final estimate for the number of people to have visited all 30 MLB stadiums is 20,000.
20,000 people is not a lot in the grand scheme of North American sports fandom in the last 50 years— it’s not even enough to fill most MLB stadiums! What’s perhaps even more crazy is that I bet this number would be less than 25% of 20,000 for other sports like the NBA and MLB. In any case, you are absolutely accomplishing something extremely rare if you do end up visiting all 30 MLB stadiums, even in the modern era. It’s slightly moving to think about the people who accomplished the feat and why they chose to do it. It really makes me wish even more that venues for other sports were able to inject the same level of uniqueness into their actual playing fields, and maybe they will in the future!
In the meantime, though, we can take a step back to admire the people who have visited every MLB stadium. We can also pick apart my rough mental math and refine this estimate over time!
There’s the bell!
