Major League Baseball is a fairly innocuous looking sport. A player throws a ball at another and they try to hit it, while the crowd look on, hot dogs in hand, or reading the paper through the slow time.
However there are 162 games in a season and few local derbies. So from an enivironmental stand point MLB is not benign at all.
The air miles traveled by each MLB team for the coming 2019 season shows that only the Detroit Lions fly less than the circumference of the earth. With Oakland and Seattle doubling that distance.
As a rough guide to the carbon impact of this, it is assumed that each team takes 40 people (the 25 man active roster plus 15 other staff)
The carbon cost for one passenger flying economy (not the Yankees) is calculated from New York (JFK) to Chicago (CGX) = 0.252 tonnes for 1200 miles giving an average passenger mile of 210grams which, for simplicity is assumed for all MLB travel.
This amounts to just under 9000 tonnes of Co2e annually. Dwarfing the emissions of Formula one racing at 54.383 tonnes per driver (just over 1000te per season)
It’s a lot of carbon to be playing in front of half empty stadiums.
great article, thank you. as an Australian your baseball is fascinating to me. I have watched 1 game/match in Toronto, where a cousin lives, and one in Phoenix on a day that was ~114F and so seemed like the best thing to do that day for a tourist. the A/C was awesome, and the game was actually fantastic too, I just had to keep TXTing the cousin in Toronto to work out what was going on when thy had to keep playing extra ‘whatever’. it is good the A/C there is zero carbon nuclear.