Royals' attendance is up about 11,500 per game; why did that never happen here?

[weams]

I'd offer to go as your bodyguard, but the two times I went to a game with you, the O's lost.

#itsdippersfault

Yeah. We mock him for leaving before Andino. But would it have happened the same? I think not.

[SteveO]

I sometimes park at Pratt and Penn, and have never felt uncomfortable walking to the stadium from there.

I have parked around there often also and have never had an issue.

[Redskins Rick]

When the O's finally started winning, they had noticeable attendance jumps, but nothing huge. The Royals are on pace to increase by more than 900,000 this year. Why did the O's never experience a huge leap like that?

The Royals drew 1.750 in 2013.

They drew 1.96 million in 2014.

Their attendance was pretty bad, looking back until 1989 and they drew very well and almost 2.5 million and they had a winning season, coming in 2nd.

Comparing the two teams and attendance, would leave me to say this.

Even, when the Orioles were in their black period of bad baseball, the fans better supported the franchise in Baltimore than in KC.

[TonySoprano]

Yeah. We mock him for leaving before Andino. But would it have happened the same? I think not.

14-2 without dipper, 0-2 with him. Just sayin

[Dipper9]

Yeah. We mock him for leaving before Andino. But would it have happened the same? I think not.

You might even take it a step further and say Dip leaving the Andino game set into motion a chain of events that lead to the Andino walkoff, 3 straight winning seasons, and the ALCS appearance in 2015. Buck should send me a Thank You card for his 2014 Manager of the Year Award, for had I not left the Andino game, there would be no such award for Buck. In fact, he'd probably be fired and back at ESPN.

[Big Al]

I believe there are several factors for the drastic KC increase. As a KC area resident for the better part of the last 25 years here are my observations.

This is a baseball town that was starving for a crumb for a very long time (much longer than Baltimore) Then last year instead of a crumb, they got a 7 layer cake.

Kauffman stadium was recently renovated to make it much more casual fan friendly. A baseball game at the "K" is marketed more as an event than just a ballgame. Some of my baseball fan friends and I joke that Kauffman is a great place to go to not watch a baseball game.

While Baltimore may have a larger media market, KC has a much larger footprint. It is not uncommon to go to a weekend game and sit next to fans from Omaha, Wichita, Des Moines etc.

[weams]

You might even take it a step further and say Dip leaving the Andino game set into motion a chain of events that lead to the Andino walkoff, 3 straight winning seasons, and the ALCS appearance in 2015. Buck should send me a Thank You card for his 2014 Manager of the Year Award, for had I not left the Andino game, there would be no such award for Buck. In fact, he'd probably be fired and back at ESPN.

Duquette in Toronto? He'd be lucky to be in Philadelphia!

[weams]

14-2 without dipper, 0-2 with him. Just sayin

Sometimes it is a chemical catalyst. Or a matter of reaction rate. Maybe it is Dipper and someone ELSE who lead to that phenomena. Probably some guy with a Javy Lopez Jersey and a Walgreen's cap. Or possibly there is a charm, a juju, or icon that is missing.

[Moshagge3]

I always think that the "there are other things to do in the city" argument is pretty specious. New York and Chicago have more entertainment options than any one person could experience in a lifetime of going out. I'm sure Hal Steinbrenner would be laughed out of town if he ever blamed a decrease in attendance at YS on all the Broadway musicals taking away his audience. And when people say that Florida teams don't draw because of the nearby beaches, come on. The summer months in Florida are exactly the time you would want to be in an air-conditioned dome and who are all these families going to the beach on a Tuesday at night instead of catching a Rays game?

[DrungoHazewood]

The Royals drew 1.750 in 2013.

They drew 1.96 million in 2014.

Their attendance was pretty bad, looking back until 1989 and they drew very well and almost 2.5 million and they had a winning season, coming in 2nd.

Comparing the two teams and attendance, would leave me to say this.

Even, when the Orioles were in their black period of bad baseball, the fans better supported the franchise in Baltimore than in KC.

It's hard to compare when the last time the Royals had any postseason success was 1985. In the 1979-85 period the Orioles were 6th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 5th, 5th, and 6th in attendance. Those were teams that were almost annually over 90 wins, over .500 every year, in the WS in '79 and '83, 100 wins in '80.

The '84 Orioles, coming off a Championship were outdrawn by the Tigers, Angels, White Sox, and Blue Jays. They were a couple slots ahead of the Royals. But about three times the draw of the Indians, who averaged about 9k a game.

[DrungoHazewood]

I always think that the "there are other things to do in the city" argument is pretty specious. New York and Chicago have more entertainment options than any one person could experience in a lifetime of going out. I'm sure Hal Steinbrenner would be laughed out of town if he ever blamed a decrease in attendance at YS on all the Broadway musicals taking away his audience. And when people say that Florida teams don't draw because of the nearby beaches, come on. The summer months in Florida are exactly the time you would want to be in an air-conditioned dome and who are all these families going to the beach on a Tuesday at night instead of catching a Rays game?

I wonder what the excuse was the Yankees used in the late 80s and early 90s? In 1992 they drew less than half the average attendance of the Orioles or Blue Jays. The Yanks were out-drawn by the Brewers, despite NYC being about 10 or 12 times as large as Milwaukee.

[notyourbuddy]

But how does anyone explain why we didn't have a similar K.C. jump after the 2012 season? We waited 14 years for a year like 2012, but K.C. exploded compared to us.

Aside from the fact that the Os had an absolutely brutal offseason?

Instead of riding a wave of excitement into the 2013 season the organization seemed to go out of their way to kill it as fast as possible.

[BradyBunch]

I wonder if the mid-western kids still look at baseball as one of their preferred sports to play.

Pretty sure, in this area, baseball is down and not one of the premier recreation league sports, anymore.

Yes, there is a decline in this manner and that was gonna happen. But it's not like they still don't produce players in the midwest. Rather its one of those things by the age of 10 you kinda have to decide what you want to do as sports on the little league and so forth level have become more competetive. Travel teams start around this time for kids and the demand is very high so you have to choose your sport.

Baseball/Softball are still one of the top recreation sports when you include adults as well.

[spiritof66]

I look at a team's attendance figures as reflecting a big chunk of the financial capability of that franchise, and at attendance rankings over the course of a few seasons as providing important information about clubs' relative resources. I am guessing pretty much everyone does the same. That's understandable since these figures (tickets sold for each game) are the only numbers MLB deigns to share with us. But financially what matters is not how many a tickets a team sells, but how many how many dollars a team is generating from those sales. That's something we don't know, but obviously teams' revenues per ticket vary a lot.

To take an imperfect look at this, I used data in the 2013 Bloomberg MLB team valuations. http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2013-10-23/mlb-team-values.html Bloomberg reported for each MLB franchise a figure for revenues from gate receipts and another from concessions. While I have no way of knowing how accurate those figures are, I believe they are, at least, well informed guesstimates for the 1993 season.

I applied those revenue figures to the 2013 home attendance for each team in the AL East to come up with each of those teams' average revenue per ticket sold and its average concession revenue for ticket sold. Here's what I got:

[table=width: 600, class: grid]

[tr]

[td]Team[/td]

[td] Ave. revenue per ticket sold [/td]

[td]Ave. concession revenue per ticket sold[/td]

[/tr]

[tr]

[td]Yankees[/td]

[td]$80.79[/td]

[td]$16.16[/td]

[/tr]

[tr]

[td]Red Sox[/td]

[td]$61.48[/td]

[td]$12.72[/td]

[/tr]

[tr]

[td]Orioles[/td]

[td]$22.03[/td]

[td]$5.93[/td]

[/tr]

[tr]

[td]Jays[/td]

[td]$17.32[/td]

[td]$4.72[/td]

[/tr]

[tr]

[td]Rays[/td]

[td]$19.87[/td]

[td]$5.30[/td]

[/tr]

[/table]

To repeat, the data I used can't be verified, and at best it's two years old. Moreover, these figures represent revenues, not profits, and the teams with the highest costs per ticket sold probably have the highest costs per ticket sold (salaries, security and vendor wages, food costs). These figures also don't take into account sharing of gate receipts with visiting teams or the effects of revenue sharing. Nonetheless, they illustrate pretty much what I expected. The Yankees, and to a lesser degree the Red Sox, will have higher ticket revenues than the rest of the division even if their attendance drops dramatically. The surprise to me was that the Jays are (or were two years ago) doing as poorly generating revenues as these numbers suggest.

[BradyBunch]

I would think the mid-West is the part of the country where baseball is likely to have remained strong. But, soccer was popular when I lived there (91-93), as well. But, lacrosse was nearly unheard of at that time while it's huge now in youth rec leagues around the mid-Atlantic.

Soccer is a big thing in the Mid-West. St. Louis has a long deep history in the sport. KC has its own history and so does Columbus. All three of them have soccer lure on their side. They tend to host some very important matches for the National Team because of the local support.

Lacrosse was unheard of everywhere except the Mid-Atlantic. There were youth teams and highschool teams going back over 100 years as it was the only way for John Hopkins, Maryland and so on to recruit. Only way to get feeders into the Olympics when it was a sport and the World Games. By 1986 you had the National Lacrosse League which encompassed mostly Mid-Atlantic cities. First 4 cities, were Baltimore, Washington, Philly and NYC team. Then came MLL.