Click me out to the ballgame: exploring city websites to assess the civic priorities of small and mid-sized communities with minor league baseball teams

The boom in publicly-funded sports facility construction since the 1980s resulted in studies that generally found the economic benefits accruing from facility construction do not justify the costs. However, focusing narrowly on economic costs in large cities leaves out an important part of the story. The author is interested in the possible non-economic benefits to a city from having a sports team and stadium, and focuses on determining any relationship between minor league teams and stadiums and community self-image. The methodology for this review is an assessment of the websites – primarily the website's front page – for 42 cities with minor league baseball teams. In addition, a survey of local government officials provides a layer of corroboration for the website review results. Through this assessment, the author brings together elements that contribute to three different fields – facility financing, e-government, and small and mid-sized cities. The website reviews have two elements. First, the author assesses the extent to which the website provides information about the team and stadium on the front page or a website page within two links from the front page. The result is that a relatively low amount of information about teams and stadiums is available on the 42 city websites. Second, the author assesses all the active links on the website front page and categorize the links regarding whether they are primarily directed toward residents, businesses, or tourists. On average 67 percent of the links on the 42 city websites' front pages are directed toward residents. In addition to the website reviews, the author reports on a survey of local government executives and managers regarding the city websites. The key findings from the survey are that residents are the group of most interest to the website creators; the websites' content and appearance generally are intended to reflect the communities' self-image, and; in general, the low amount of information about the teams and stadiums on the website front page accurately represents the importance of the teams and stadiums to communities' self-image. The survey results generally corroborate the website reviews.