The truth about the Orioles attendance - we are really #8 in the league (per capita)

[Rojo13]

I have grown sick of reading article after article in recent weeks of people complaining about the Orioles lack of attendance.

All of these columnists (and radio guys) are really angering me as they are writing the dumbest articles in history. As a journalist myself with an economics degree, I decided to add some facts to the discussion.

In my mind, Baltimore is a good baseball town. What people have been failing to recognize is something very simple - Baltimore isn't a very large city.

Earlier in the week, I went to mlb.com and looked up the average attendance of all the mlb clubs. I then went to wikipedia and looked up the population for the metropolitan area for each team (I even divided by 2 for cities that have two teams).

I then ranked the teams on attendance figures per capita.

Guess where we rank?

#8.

And to be honest, this quick analysis probably understates the population issue facing the Orioles as we have an MLB team 105 miles to the north of us (Philly) and another 45 miles south (Nats).

I grew up a Texas Rangers fan. The nearest team to south is Houston which is 240 miles away. The team closest to north is Kansas City which is more than 500 miles away. So teams like that can easily draw from millions of people not reflected in their metropolitan area population figures.

Before that Nats arrived, the closest team to Baltimore in a southernly direction was Atlanta which is nearly 700 miles away (699).

On any given game at Camden Yards, nearly 1% of the Baltimore metropolitan area is at the game (.96%). Yet everyone is raving about our rival Toronto?s attendance even though at any given home game, they are only attracting .74% of their metro population and they don?t have a team within 200 miles of them in any direction.

The Dodgers lead the league in attendance but they only attract .34% of their metro population to each game ? the Orioles attract nearly three times much. Even when you double that .34% to .68% to account for the fact there are two teams in LA, the Orioles are still nearly 50% better.

Yes, attendance is down this year a little from last year even though the team is better. Why? Well the riots couldn?t have helped but I think the main reason is ticket prices. If you factor in the 20% season ticket price increase, I imagine more is being spent at the games in 2016 than 2015.

Here is a spreadsheet ranking the teams in attendance per capita.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13HS3hjSxxV1YEWM5pVv5KmsYOWix4ovOh1HKtsxLEFM/edit?usp=sharing

A summary of the data is below where you see the rank of the teams by perct of metropolitan area attending each home game (the 2nd # is the actual attendance rank).

1 19 Milwaukee 1.82%

2 3 San Francisco 1.79%

3 12 Kansas City 1.54%

4 2 St. Louis 1.52%

5 16 Pittsburgh 1.24%

6 11 Colorado 1.18%

7 24 Cincinnati 1.11%

8 20 Baltimore 0.96%

9 28 Cleveland 0.96%

10 15 San Diego 0.88%

11 5 Chicago Cubs 0.83%

12 29 Oakland 0.82%

13 18 Seattle 0.77%

14 8 Boston 0.76%

15 4 Toronto 0.74%

16 14 Detroit 0.73%

17 21 Minnesota 0.71%

18 1 LA Dodgers 0.68%

19 7 LA Angels 0.57%

20 30 Tampa Bay 0.54%

21 23 Arizona 0.53%

22 13 Washington 0.52%

23 26 Chicago WSox 0.48%

24 10 Texas 0.47%

25 17 Houston 0.43%

26 25 Atlanta 0.41%

27 22 Philadelphia 0.41%

28 6 NY Yankees 0.39%

29 27 Miami 0.36%

30 9 NY Mets 0.35%

[eddie83]

Good work. I was getting sick of seeing Jays fans on Twitter-not that I should care- running their mouths about how bad our attendance was. Their city and Metro area dwarfs us.

Also as I have seen many people point out not many fans who live in city come to games. I'm sure some cities have much better attendance from the cities themselves.

[Can_of_corn]

Any metric that has the Rays' attendance in the top two thirds of the league I question.

[ChuckS]

All I see here, is that cities with a large population/metropolitan area are ranked at the bottom and cities with a small are ranked at the top.

I don't think too much can be read into these numbers.

[Going Underground]

Any metric that has the Rays' attendance in the top two thirds of the league I question.

Cleveland with the 10,000 fans and ranked behind the Orioles. Did you factor in big cities have more entertainment options and many have more then one or two professional sports teams.Based on population then the Yankees and Mets should draw 10 million fans a year

[Can_of_corn]

Cleveland with the 10,000 fans and ranked behind the Orioles. Did you factor in big cities have more entertainment options and many have more then one or two professional sports teams.Based on population then the Yankees and Mets should draw 10 million fans a year

I was thinking that stadium size is a factor that wasn't being addressed. Red Sox sell out every game right?

[Going Underground]

If your population is double Baltimore like Wasington then they would have to draw 4 million fans or more to compare to Baltimore. I understand you will draw more in most cases if you have a bigger population base or geographic area.Cleveland attendance stinks anyway you look at it.First place team and horrible crowds.

[Chavez Ravine]

Here is another way of looking at Rojo13's data. It is just a plot of attendance as a function of population size. The per capita attendance (a ratio) has scaling issues that tend to muddle things, I think.

Among other things, in this perspective Tampa comes out at the bottom of attendance for its population size.

[eddie83]

If your population is double Baltimore like Wasington then they would have to draw 4 million fans or more to compare to Baltimore. I understand you will draw more in most cases if you have a bigger population base or geographic area.Cleveland attendance stinks anyway you look at it.First place team and horrible crowds.

Everything can be analyzed. Not like with mountains to the west, an ocean to the east, the Bay and our nations capital nearby there aren't plenty of things to do around here.

Some of these cities have huge population bases compared to Baltimore. This is not a big market compared to many MLB cities.

[Tryptamine]

This math doesn't work. It puts big cities at a huge disadvantage. For example, Chicago has a huge population but Wrigley only holds 38K. There are many more who would like to go especially on weekends, but when you're sold out you're sold out. That's going to greatly skew things in favor of smaller fan bases.

[George]

The analysis ignores the fact that the larger the city, the more entertainment options are there. Thus teams in larger cities have more competition for the entertainment dollar. Another ignored effect is the variation in disposable income from city to city.

[weams]

This math doesn't work. It puts big cities at a huge disadvantage. For example, Chicago has a huge population but Wrigley only holds 38K. There are many more who would like to go especially on weekends, but when you're sold out you're sold out. That's going to greatly skew things in favor of smaller fan bases.

No it doesn't. You only need 50k folks in an affluent area that have the disposable income to waste on season tickets. Much more likely in ANY larger city. Its not an average income. It's a mean that you look at.

[Ohfan67]

Chavez Ravine's graph does a better job of exploring the relationship between population size and attendance. You can only pack so many fans in a ballpark so at some point increasing population size just results in a smaller and smaller percentage attending games, even if every game was sold out.

[DrungoHazewood]

Also, teams don't necessarily maximize attendance. They maximize profits. You kind of get at that point when teams aren't building 70k seat stadiums any more. They probably make more with 30k fans with large disposable incomes than 50k of mostly folks paying for $15 bleacher seats.