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Sobering Up After the Seventh Inning: Alcohol and Crime Around the Ballpark

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Abstract

Objectives

This study examines the impact of alcohol consumption in a Major League Baseball (MLB) stadium on area level counts of crime. The modal practice at MLB stadiums is to stop selling alcoholic beverages after the seventh inning. Baseball is not a timed game, so the duration between the last call for alcohol at the end of the seventh inning and the end of the game varies considerably, providing a unique natural experiment to estimate the relationship between alcohol consumption and crime near a stadium on game days.

Methods

Crime data were obtained from Philadelphia for the period 2006–2015 and geocoded to the area around the MLB stadium as well as popular sports bars. We rely on difference-in-differences regression models to estimate the change in crime on home game days around the stadium as the game time extends into extra innings to other areas of the city and around sports bars in Philadelphia relative to days when the baseball team plays away from home.

Results

When there are extra innings and more game-time after the seventh inning alcohol sales stoppage crime declines significantly around the stadium. The crime reduction benefit of the last call alcohol policy is undone when a complex of sports bars opens in the stadium parking lot in 2012. The results suggest that alcohol consumption during baseball games is a contributor to crime.

Conclusions

The findings provide further support for environmental theories of crime that note the congregation of people in places with excessive alcohol consumption is a generator of violent crime in cities. The consumption of alcohol in MLB stadiums appears to increase crime.

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Notes

  1. See https://www.xfinitylive.com.

  2. Kurland and Johnson (2019) provide detailed review of this literature.

  3. Major League Baseball is a member of Team Coalition (along with the other major U.S. sports leagues) which does provide a list of best practices regarding alcohol sales. See https://teamcoalition.org/training/policies/

  4. See https://fansdontletfansdrivedrunk.org/team/mlb/philadelphia-phillies/#1442768220251-8edb53aa-bec4d832-ba39ff22-02f5.

  5. The longest game in MLB history was 25 innings and lasted eight hours and six minutes on May 8, 1984 between Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers.

  6. There have been fewer than 200 total instances where an individual pitcher has thrown just three pitches in an inning, but none of these instances occurred in the same inning by two opposing pitchers. See https://www.baseball-almanac.com/feats/3_pitch_inning.shtml.

  7. https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SFN/SFN199907260.shtml.

  8. San Francisco Giant Brandon Belt faced a total of 21 pitches from Los Angeles Angels pitcher Jaime Barria in the 1st inning of the April 22, 2018 match. See https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/ANA/ANA201804220.shtml.

  9. The advanced statistic PACE provides some measure of how fast pitchers work. In some years, based on the PACE metric, the difference between the fastest and slowest working pitchers may be as much as 10 s per throw.

  10. https://www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/crime-incidents.

  11. The block designated 9806 on this map https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/dc10map/tract/st42_pa/c42101_philadelphia/DC10CT_C42101_003.pdf.

  12. There are 66 PSAs in Philadelphia. PSAs are police patrol boundaries within police districts that were designed to be reflective of neighborhood boundaries as part of the Philadelphia Police Department’s shift to community police.

  13. https://www.phillypolice.com/districts/3rd/index.html.

  14. The generally available baseball game data have a specific time of first pitch and a total time of game from the first pitch to the final out, but do not include a time of the last out. To determine the time of the last out, we added the game time to the first pitch time.

  15. The generally available baseball statistics do not note which games have rain delays. We purchased information on rain delay time from Stats Perform (formerly Stats LLC), a data provider for MLB. From 2006–2015, the Phillies played 54 games where there was rain delay time. While it might be interesting to include the variation induced by rain delays (with post seventh inning delays adding to the time when alcohol is not sold), the Stats Perform data do not note specifically when the delay time occurs. Also, since many fans leave the stadium when there is a rain delay, crime data on those days is likely not comparable.

  16. While time stamped pitches are now available for more recent years, they are not available throughout our sample period.

  17. See, for example, https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/lifestyle/how-long-does-alcohol-stay-in-your-blood/.

  18. A simple difference-in-difference estimate (i.e., the coefficient on the CBP and home game interaction using the CBP indicator and home game indicator as covariates) yields the following coefficients and robust standard errors: total 0.136 (0.024); assault 0.035 (0.010); theft 0.011 (0.005); liquor 0.014 (0.007); and disorderly conduct 0.009 (0.006).

  19. We only focus on game days since non-game days cannot provide us with a pitches thrown number or a reliable proxy.

  20. We also examined specifications that use total pitches to proxy for game duration, observing similar results.

  21. We present the p-values from the t statistics as suggested by MacKinnon and Webb (2019), though inferences are largely unchanged if we relied on placebo coefficients.

  22. Randomization inference or permutation tests are increasingly being used in criminology applications like this one (see Kurland et al. 2014; Ridgeway & MacDonald 2017).

  23. The New York Mets, New York Yankees, Baltimore Orioles, and Washington Nationals are all within a 2.5 h drive of CBP.

  24. This margin is used by the MLB to designate a game as a save situation.

  25. We use the 75th percentile attendance figure of 45,135 to designate a game as high attendance.

  26. We constructed a CBP treatment area that better approximated the natural boundaries of the stadium. We aggregate crime in the area around the ballpark between I-76 in the North, I-95 in the South, Broad Street to the West, and a 1500 feet distance to the East. We then keep all of the other census blocks constant. This re-organizing of the data allows us to construct a tighter boundary around the ballpark, perhaps shoring up confidence that any observed effect is driven by the drinking policy.

  27. Data cover 2006–2011. Only regular season games are included in game data. Game days that include a double header or games with rain delay time are excluded from the data. Non-game days are excluded for games played in the Eastern time zone, the time period covered is the time of the first pitch to the end of the game plus one hour. For games played in different time zones, the time period covered is the time of the first pitch converted to Eastern time through the end of the game plus one hour. Xfinity Live opened in the South Philadelphia Sports Complex (which includes Citizens Bank Park) parking lot in March 2012. The area around Citizens Bank Park goes West to Broad Street, South to I-95, North to I-76, and East for 1,500 feet. Comparisons are similar distances in each direction around the following sports bars: Cavanaugh’s (Center City); Cavanaugh’s (University City); Chickie’s and Pete’s (Robbins Avenue); Chickie’s and Pete’s (Roosevelt Avenue); Garage Fishtown; Leneghan’s Crusader Inn (Northeast); the Manayunk Tavern; McGillin’s Olde Ale House (Center City); Pub Webb (North Philadelphia); and Standard Tap (Northern Liberties).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carey Law School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Jonathan Klick

  2. Department of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania, 558 McNeil Building, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6286, USA

    John MacDonald

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  1. Jonathan Klick
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  2. John MacDonald
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Correspondence to John MacDonald.

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Klick, J., MacDonald, J. Sobering Up After the Seventh Inning: Alcohol and Crime Around the Ballpark. J Quant Criminol 37, 813–834 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09497-7

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