DrungoHazewood

I think they know they have to balance building connections to the fanbase with revenues. I'm not even sure the math works out if you don't consider the impacts of pricing most your fans out of ever going to a game. If most teams charged $100 a ticket (which is at least double and maybe close to triple the current average) you'll see large attendance declines. Possibly, probably, more than enough to offset the higher revenues per fan, with huge impacts downstream.

It's 8.8 strikeouts per team per game, up from 5.5 in 1992. They've taken more than six plays per game out of the hands of fielders and turned them into strikeouts in the last 25 years. While in the same period they've basically doubled the number of homers from 0.72/team/game to 1.4. So that's about eight PAs a game something used to happen and now nine guys watch the batter walk back to the dugout or jog around the bases. Also, steals are down by nearly half since 1987, from .85 to .46 per game. In '87 an average team stole 138 bases, today it's 75.

According to Forbes the Nats had $336M in revenues in 2018, compared to $250M for the Orioles. MLB may be in trouble, maybe not. Attendance has been declining for a decade, but revenues are still at or near historic highs. We'll see if changes to media models and contracts eventually reflect a smaller fanbase with smaller revenues. I think conventional wisdom is attendance is a good proxy for size of fanbase, but in the era of constant connectivity and 65" TVs that may no longer be as true as it used to be.

There are tremendous restaurants in that area. Blue Jacket, the Korean taco place, there's a great Chinese place, like five minutes from 8th street and lots of good stuff there. And I've only been there a handful of times, I'm sure I don't know the half of it.

TV. That's the big change. 25-30 years ago you basically couldn't watch most European soccer in the US without going to a bar with a specialized satellite link. 10-15 years ago you could watch a handful of English or German or maybe Italian games mostly on obscure tiers of pay-extra cable packages. Today I can watch essentially every Tottenham Hotspur league match and Champions League match, some of them even on NBC broadcast networks. I can certainly stream more English soccer matches (at least legally) than I can Orioles games. Plus my kids don't really watch full games of any sport, but they'll watch soccer highlights all the time on YouTube. Today if you live in Maryland it's about as easy to be a fan of Wolverhampton Wanderers as it is of the Detroit Red Wings or the Kansas City Royals. I have more access to information and highlights and merchandise of 3rd division German football than I did about Everton in 1995. MLS just needs time. It's been around 25 years, but half the teams are expansion teams in the last 10 years or so. Much of what is thought of as an intense fanbase is actually just the fact that your grandpa rooted for the same team. People will say MLS can't really gain a foothold because Americans won't root for anything but the highest level leagues. That's just not true. College football may be more popular than the NFL. In many circles college basketball is definitely more popular than the NBA. Right now most MLS teams have core supporters groups that are as die-hard as any fan group of any football or hockey or baseball team. With time those will just grow. What soccer really has going for it is demographics. The fanbase is younger than the other sports, and it's much more representative of the parts of the population that are growing. The Nats would kill for an equivalent of the Screaming Eagles or La Barra Brava or El Norte.

I think that's quite a stretch. There is not a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of soccer and baseball fans. It's me, maybe you, and like 10 other people. In any case, how many times has United and the Nats had a game at the same time? Never? Also, United's attendance is up 4-5k a game from the RFK days. Every single one of them would have to be disaffected Nats fans for that to be the impact. 2nd caveat: there's not a fixed number of fans. I'm guessing DC United, Nats and Orioles attendance numbers are largely independent of one another.

That's why they're tweaking the ball. They have no solution for the strikeouts that doesn't involve a fairly obvious change to conditions or rules that fans and players will push back against pretty heavily. MLB's first (and 2nd and 3rd and 4th) instinct is always to do nothing, and if that doesn't work change something they can deny or say was just a clarification like the ball or the strike zone. The Yankees would have to have a paid attendance of 345 before they'd change a real playing rule.

I want to know what they're doing with the ball next year. If they go back to 2014 baseballs a lot of players will go from 35 homers to 22. I'm guessing they want to dial back homers by 10-20%, but they've never been really good at that kind of fine motor skills. In 1987-88 they tried to get things back to normal and homers dropped 40% and offenses fell 2/3rds of a run a game.

In 2001 Hairston had 25 doubles, five triples and eight homers, and that was pretty typical for him except for the fact he managed to play a full season. The average MLB batter that year hit 17 homers per 600 PAs. This year the average MLB batter hits 22 homers per 600 PAs. I don't think that's likely to change eight homers into 30. I think it turns it into 10 or 12. Unless you're going to assume he completely changed his approach to emphasize launch angle, and that change was all positive.

If they'd decided that 2200 hits was the sole criteria for a position player making the Hall they'd probably have no more misses than they actually do. In real life one of the primary criteria for 30-40 Hall of Famers is "exaggerated stories by his buddies." Hits may work as well as that. You'd get some weird looks when people remember that Omar Vizquel and Bill Buckner have almost twice as many hits as Hack Wilson and Jackie Robinson. Al Oliver out-hit Hank Greenberg by over 1000. Doc Cramer had 2700 hits and a career rWAR of eight; that might actually be worse than putting in Tommy McCarthy.

If he had 3400 hits and 72 rWAR, and no failed PED tests or gambling on baseball? Yea, probably. Everyone else meeting those criteria is in.

Right. I'm sure it was still there circa 2015. Which is fine. Don't whitewash history, but there's absolutely no reason to give the game's highest honor and a platform to a guy who knowingly and repeatedly broke fundamental rules of the game and consistently lied about it. It's bad enough that Jimmy's Cut-Rate Memorabilia Shop 100 feet down the street from the Hall lets Rose set up a table, talk about his oppression and injustice, and charge $200 an autograph every induction weekend.

I'm sure when the O's move to Portland or Austin or Mexico City or whatever the Nats' attendance will go up by hundreds of fans a year. It's an easy 90 minutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic from Towson to the Navy Yard on a Tuesday night at 6:30.

That might not be the most balanced, objective take on the issue.

Manny has about the same number of hits in the same amount of playing time through age 26 as Ken Griffey Jr, Frank Robinson, Miguel Cabrera, and Mike Trout. Through his age he's 32nd all time in rWAR. Some of his peers in the 25-35 range are Robin Yount, Cal, George Brett, Ron Santo. Players with 1000+ games through 26 and lesser career value include Roberto Alomar, Bryce Harper, Ivan Rodriguez, Orlando Cepeda, Adrian Beltre, and Bobby Doerr. Roberto Clemente had 3700 PAs through 26 and was worth less than 2/3rds what Manny has been. There are 150-odd position players in the Hall, and about 28 of them were more productive through Manny's age than Manny has been. I certainly enjoyed watching Manny play in Baltimore, and hope that he continues to play well and will eventually end up in the Hall.

I'm skeptical. I don't know that catchers bloom any later than anyone else. I suspect that the injury rate might lead to catchers washing out earlier, or at least failing to develop as hitters at higher rates than other positions. Certainly there are a large number of very high performing catchers whose career ended in their early 30s. Bench. Yogi caught 100 games in a season once after 32. Carter's last 2-win season was at 32. Piazza 34. After 32 Dickey never caught more than 104 games in a season. Mauer was done as a catcher at 30. Simmons' last 2-win season was at 33. Cochrane was done as a regular at 32. Tenace at 34. The record for games caught is four or five seasons worth of games less than at other positions. This would require a big study, but I think it's very unlikely that catchers peak later, or offensively bloom later, than others.

To a large degree people are fans of sports they've participated in, even at a lower level. There are exceptions, of course. Many, many football fans never played football outside of pickup games in their neighborhood. But... the St. Mary's County soccer league has many hundreds of girls who play. Maybe 1000, in a county that only has 120k people total. They have rec leagues, RecPlus Leagues, and very successful travel teams. There are many, many girls who've probably been made lifelong soccer fans by playing. I guess there are some girls softball teams in the area, and a small handful of girls on the boys' baseball teams, but I'd guess two or three or five times as many play soccer.

That's a little apples-to-oranges. United has 17 league home games, plus a few friendlies and cup matches. As the NFL shows it's easier to draw when you play once, occasionally twice a week. The Spirit doubled their single game attendance record because they had a special match at United's Audi Field, but play most of their home games at the Maryland SoccerPlex. The main stadium at the SoccerPlex seats six or seven thousand, Audi Field 20k. The Spirit did have a large percentage increase in attendance this year, but they only play 11 home games and were up from 3800 a game to just over 6000. Literally 30% of their total "home" attendance came at that one-off game at Audi Field. That's like if the Orioles played a single sellout game at a 200,000 seat NASCAR stadium, added that to the normal home attendance, and then touted how popular they got this year.

It's quite astounding to have a guy with a career minor league OPS of .642 be crowned most average player in the majors. Coming into the season I would have projected his OPS to be in the .600 range.

In 1977 it looks like the Orioles' total revenues were something like $5M. You can infer that from this article, and by totaling up their salaries from here. It's not quite as important to draw a huge number of people to the stadium when you can bring in $250M a year at under 1.5M in paid attendance. If they lost 500,000 fans from the seats their ticket revenues would only go down by $13M, or 5% of total revenues. Media revenues are far more lucrative than ticket sales. If they really wanted to sell the place out they'd price tickets at far below where they currently are, but they'd rather maximize revenues.

That's the opposite of Yogi's old saying, that nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded. Your hypothesis is that nobody will go to the games anymore because nobody goes to the games anymore.

Best case is he hits .330 at Fredrick, is promoted to Bowie in May or June, continues to hit, and is in Baltimore by late in the year.

Is that because he won't be up until they're winning a lot more, or because of Rutschman? I'll agree with the former, but if they're 70-77 next September and he makes his debut the spike in attendance will be a few thousand fans that night. Unless he's been hitting .410-44-152 for the Tides...

Okay, sure. So it's 1/3 instead of 1/7th.

I think it's a little more nuanced than that. I think that half of that total are people who go to the game because it's something to do. Use the minor leagues as a comparison. Columbus and Indianapolis are cities a little smaller than Baltimore. They have changed affiliations off and on over the last few decades so there's little continuity, little connection to history. They are AAA teams, so mostly devoid of top prospects, and when they get one he's usually only there for a fraction of the season. Both of those teams drew the 81-game equivalent of about 700k fans. I think about half or more of the Orioles attendance is made up of people who are mostly disconnected from the particulars of the team. They show up because an Oriole game is a thing to do that's family friendly and you can have a beer and hang out. I've always theorized that you could go around OPACY and ask people who Bobby Grich or Mickey Tettleton or Luis Matos is and you'd get mostly blank stares or wild guesses. We're not that different from Red Sox fans who mostly think ancient history is when Johnny Damon was on the team. Back to your 3rd point, they're not going to lose that 700k-1M fans. They just show up no matter what. And on top of that you get other fans who care what the team does.