WeHaveMoreCupsThanYou
I will get banned again soon, worry not.
I agree that 35K is a tad on the smallish side. Like you say, the extra 5K worth of seats is well worth it when the Yankees or Red Sox come to town. It would balance out the low crowds when Kansas City or Oakland show up. I get the theory: they want to keep capacity small enough that it creates demand but you need to be able to cash in when demand is high. 40K would be ideal I think. Any more than that and it becomes too easy to get tickets. They could even do what the Mariners do. Safeco Field seats about 47-48K but there's an entire section of the upper deck behind the right field fence that they don't sell tickets for. Even with that the team is so bad that no one goes to games but they block off those sections in order to lower capacity and hopefully manufacture some degree of demand. But if and when the Mariners get good again and demand goes up, they have those extra seats they can put up for sale. The Expos don't have to print tickets for every seat in the house for every game, but if they have an extra 5K that they have the option of opening up when a big-ticket team like the Yanks or Bosox show up, then it's all good. And I believe that between now and the day they put shovels into the ground that original plan will have been amended to squeeze in a few thousand extra seats.
Another thing that pro sports teams do now that was unheard of back when the Expos were alive is this so-called "dynamic" pricing. Under this model, tickets for an individual game have a starting price and then, as they are sold and become more scarce, the price goes up to mirror demand. This means that stadiums become more like commercial airliners: the guy sitting next to you on the plane may have paid significantly more or significantly less for his ticket than you did depending on when he bought it relative to when you bought yours. What this pricing model also does is encourage both season ticket or mini-pack sales as well as getting potential buyers to commit their money earlier rather than waiting or walking up.
As for the retractable roof, forget it. If you read through the entire Ernst & Young feasibility study you would see why. The cost of adding a roof is prohibitively expensive and, in the end, not cost-effective. The study compared Montreal to Minneapolis, which has a similar population base and, more importantly, comparable weather. Target Field is open air and in the whole time it's been open they've had only a handful of games rained out. Putting on a roof that nearly doubles the cost of your stadium for the sake of 3 or 4 rain outs is a waste of good money. I've been driving down to Seattle for Mariners games ever since Safeco was built and I have NEVER had to watch a game under the roof. On only one occasion was the roof closed when I got to the park and they opened it right before the game started. That roof nearly doubled the cost of building Safeco. Back in the late-90's when it opened it cost $600 million ($1 billion CAD at the time) Montrealers will not countenance another billion dollar boondoggle with a "retractable" roof that you and I both know will wind up never being able to retract. The Expos spent most of their 34 years playing in open air and they managed just fine. The worst years of that franchise were played under the dome, which helped to drive away fans just as much as bad play on the field ever did. Montreal summers are too short to be spent sitting in a dome.
