Attendance 2019

[DrungoHazewood]

19 hours ago, TonySoprano said:

Miami rose by 198 people to 811,302 while going 57-105 in Derek Jeter’s second season as chief executive.

There's some good news hidden in everything.  Derek Jeter, 120-203 record, 811k attendance.  That just warms the heart.

[spiritof66]

4 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

There's some good news hidden in everything.  Derek Jeter, 120-203 record, 811k attendance.  That just warms the heart.

That has to be the feel-good story of 2019.

Possible runner-up is Lew Ford and the Long Island Ducks winning the independent Atlantic League championship last night by beating the Sugar Land Skeeters, 8-4, in the decisive fifth game of their series. (By the way, Ford was followed in the Ducks' batting order by one L.J. Mazzilli, the son of former major leaguer Lee Mazzilli. Something in the back of my mind tells me that Lee Mazzilli had a brief non-playing connection with the Orioles, but I've managed to suppress that memory.) 

[TonySoprano]

59 minutes ago, spiritof66 said:

Something in the back of my mind tells me that Lee Mazzilli had a brief non-playing connection with the Orioles, but I've managed to suppress that memory.) 

Yeah, it was all Mazzilli's (129-140, .480) fault 2005 went downhill.  In fact, I bet he was the one that injected Palmeiro with the needle from Tejada's little black briefcase.  That's why Peter fired him 4 days after Palmeiro got his 10 game suspension.   Yeah, the Orioles had hit a real rough patch, going 3-16 at the end of Mazz' tenure.  Perlozzo had a 5-15 run which began about 2 weeks later (8/17-9/9), followed by a 2-13 skid (9/14-19).

Angelos never liked Mazzilli, but he left it up to Beatagan to pick their man.   Mazzilli didn't get to pick his own coaches, however.  In fact, one of his coaches, Rick Dempsey, made it a point to meet with Angelos directly to bad mouth his manager.  Poor back-stabbing Rick was gunning for the manager's job himself.  Sucked to be him.  Big Pete wanted Perlozzo all along, and Sam rewarded him with a 122-167 (.427) mark across three seasons, even after bringing his pal Leo Mazzone in as pitching coach.  Yep, we went from Lee Mazz as manager to Leo Mazz as PC.   

Peter sure knew his baseball though.  He shrewdly saddled Mazzilli with Sammy Sosa in 2005, acquired in a trade from his pal Sweater Vest Andy's Cubs.  Sosa proceeded to post an OPS+ of 78 and a rWAR of -0.4 before missing the last month of the season with toe jam football.  Didn't know what Sammy used to shoot, but it wasn't coca cola.

As a footnote, Mazzilli's firing was the one time an OH "insider" came through with a scoop, and it was Wild Bill, IIRC.   It also marks the first time, Peter paid for two managers at the same time.

[spiritof66]

Pretty much everybody who tries to assess the direction of MLB or an MLB  team's financial health focuses on the number of tickets sold. The more relevant data, in my opinion are gate receipts -- the revenues received from ticket buyers.

When they sell tickets to their games, MLB presumably are trying to maximize their revenues -- that is, their gate receipts. If a team has raised its ticket prices over last year by 10 percent, it might feel pretty good about the financial impact of a 2 percent decline in its home attendance. And it's not the case that each ticket sold generates the same revenue; to understand the season-to-season direction of a team's gate receipts, you need to know the mix of prices of the tickets sold in each of those years, not just the number of tickets sold and overall ticket prices for each year.

You can argue that teams should not be focused solely on revenues from the tickets it sells, since it would be better for building the game's future for teams to sell more tickets at lower prices, bringing more fans out to games, even if that would result in lower gate receipts. But most of MLB's owners have made it clear that what they're trying to do, over a limited time period if not in each season, is to maximize profits and win games, with little or no regard to building future interest in baseball (at least where there's some loss of revenue or some significant cost attached to the latter).

Complete, up-to-date and and reliable data on tickets sold by each team are always just a click away. Gate receipts, on the other hand, are available for the most part only in the Forbes numbers that are reported months after the season is over (and, while I think those numbers are pretty reliable, that's not entirely certain). As a result, we tend to look only to the former data point for each team, but that's probably not the most important fact from the point of view of a team owner.  

When the Commissioner or a team owner talks about the health of the game, I try to keep in mind that they have a lot more information than I do, and that flat attendance or a small attendance decline may look different to them from what it looks like to me. 

[Frobby]

8 minutes ago, spiritof66 said:

Pretty much everybody who tries to assess the direction of MLB or an MLB  team's financial health focuses on the number of tickets sold. The more relevant data, in my opinion are gate receipts -- the revenues received from ticket buyers.

When they sell tickets to their games, MLB presumably are trying to maximize their revenues -- that is, their gate receipts. If a team has raised its ticket prices over last year by 10 percent, it might feel pretty good about the financial impact of a 2 percent decline in its home attendance. And it's not the case that each ticket sold generates the same revenue; to understand the season-to-season direction of a team's gate receipts, you need to know the mix of prices of the tickets sold in each of those years, not just the number of tickets sold and overall ticket prices for each year.

You can argue that teams should not be focused solely on revenues from the tickets it sells, since it would be better for building the game's future for teams to sell more tickets at lower prices, bringing more fans out to games, even if that would result in lower gate receipts. But most of MLB's owners have made it clear that what they're trying to do, over a limited time period if not in each season, is to maximize profits and win games, with little or no regard to building future interest in baseball (at least where there's some loss of revenue or some significant cost attached to the latter).

Complete, up-to-date and and reliable data on tickets sold by each team are always just a click away. Gate receipts, on the other hand, are available for the most part only in the Forbes numbers that are reported months after the season is over (and, while I think those numbers are pretty reliable, that's not entirely certain). As a result, we tend to look only to the former data point for each team, but that's probably not the most important fact from the point of view of a team owner.  

When the Commissioner or a team owner talks about the health of the game, I try to keep in mind that they have a lot more information than I do, and that flat attendance or a small attendance decline may look different to them from what it looks like to me. 

I think both are important.   Gate receipts are an important source of revenue, but by no means the biggest source of revenue these days.  Attendance tells you something about overall fan interest in the game that gate receipts don't necessarily tell you.   I do suspect that the overall decline in MLB attendance is driven significantly by the aging of the fan base.   Older fans are dying or are becoming less able to travel to games, and younger fans are not replacing them fast enough.    The other causes arguably are (1) the slowing pace of games, and/or (2) the increasing number of teams who, like the Orioles, are not really trying to play respectable baseball while they rebuild.    A league full of teams who are winning between, say, 60 and 102 games, with a lot of teams in the 75-87 win range, will draw better than a league full of teams who are winning between 54 and 108 games with only a couple of teams in the middle (and those teams are further behind the top teams than they'd be in a more balanced league).

[spiritof66]

2 minutes ago, Frobby said:

I think both are important.   Gate receipts are an important source of revenue, but by no means the biggest source of revenue these days.  Attendance tells you something about overall fan interest in the game that gate receipts don't necessarily tell you.   I do suspect that the overall decline in MLB attendance is driven significantly by the aging of the fan base.   Older fans are dying or are becoming less able to travel to games, and younger fans are not replacing them fast enough.    The other causes arguably are (1) the slowing pace of games, and/or (2) the increasing number of teams who, like the Orioles, are not really trying to play respectable baseball while they rebuild.    A league full of teams who are winning between, say, 60 and 102 games, with a lot of teams in the 75-87 win range, will draw better than a league full of teams who are winning between 54 and 108 games with only a couple of teams in the middle (and those teams are further behind the top teams than they'd be in a more balanced league).

Among the other things I would like to know are (a) how many tickets sold by each team aren't used, and (b) how many tickets sold by each team are bought by companies and service firms, as opposed to people.

You're right -- I think -- about the effect on competition and attendance of a lot of teams rebuilding in an extreme way. Those teams, in effect, have decided not to maximize gate receipts or try to sell as many tickets as they can this year. It's hard to figure out what to make of those teams' diminished attendance. And it remains an open question whether, if the rebuild succeeds, how fast and how much attendance and gate receipts will bounce back -- especially if the rebuilt team performs well, but not as spectacularly well as Houston, as I would expect would be the case in the AL East, NL Central or AL West.

[DrungoHazewood]

14 hours ago, Frobby said:

The other causes arguably are (1) the slowing pace of games, and/or (2) the increasing number of teams who, like the Orioles, are not really trying to play respectable baseball while they rebuild.  

I'm sure those are important.  But what if a key reason is that younger people just aren't that into baseball?  Sometimes selling people born after 1995 on baseball feels like trying to get the same crowd into buying Buicks and Harleys.  Years ago the three most popular sports in America were horse racing, boxing, and baseball.  I'd rather clean grout than watch horse racing and boxing.

[NCRaven]

I have seen a resurgence of youth rec ball in my area of Carroll county.  For years there were no league games at our local school fields.  This spring there was and now I'm seeing Fall ball games on Sunday afternoons.  So, there's hope.  Also, as families turn away from football due to brain injuries and the like, there's still hope that parents may steer their kids (boys and girls) toward baseball - among other activities.

[Ohfan67]

3 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

I'm sure those are important.  But what if a key reason is that younger people just aren't that into baseball?  Sometimes selling people born after 1995 on baseball feels like trying to get the same crowd into buying Buicks and Harleys.  Years ago the three most popular sports in America were horse racing, boxing, and baseball.  I'd rather clean grout than watch horse racing and boxing.

I personally spend less time watching sports now than at almost any time in my life. Busy life, lots of things to do for entertainment, and although I occasionally watch a college football game on Saturday in general I have better things to do with my time. I know more and more of my friends, even die hard baseball fans, actually watch less sports in general now and baseball specifically. They still follow their teams and watch some, but watch way less than they did. 

[DrungoHazewood]

3 hours ago, Ohfan67 said:

I personally spend less time watching sports now than at almost any time in my life. Busy life, lots of things to do for entertainment, and although I occasionally watch a college football game on Saturday in general I have better things to do with my time. I know more and more of my friends, even die hard baseball fans, actually watch less sports in general now and baseball specifically. They still follow their teams and watch some, but watch way less than they did. 

I probably watch almost as much sports as ever.  But it's mostly U13 and U12 soccer instead of the Orioles, DC United, and Virginia Tech.  Five or six days a week I have either Dad or coaching duties with my kids' games.

But it's true that when I was 25 I tried to watch every inning I could, and at one point had a run of about two years where I never missed being in attendance at a Tech football game, home, away or bowl.  At 48 it seems excessive and wasteful to spend 650 hours a year watching the Orioles.  You only get so much time on Earth, it doesn't all have to be about Rich Amaral.