The following is but a portion of a MUCH longer post I plan on publishing to my blog in the coming days. Before then, I'd like to get some analysis from the Lookout Landing crowd regarding my tactics and very simple formula. Above all else, I want my posts to get people thinking, so if you think of a better, more accurate way to do this, I'm all ears.
In other words, for the amount of losing that the Mariners had done, the fanbase was REMARKABLY RESILIENT. Not convincing enough? That's fine, because I'm about to take things a step further.
I made a spreadsheet featuring 10 of the most putrid teams over the last ten years. Unsurprisingly, the Mariners were not the worst. The Royals, Orioles and Pirates took those honors, each reaching fewer than 700 wins. All ten of the teams selected lost at least 100 games in a single sometime in the decade. The Diamondbacks also managed this feat, but they also won a world series in 2001, so the two sort of off-set in my book.
(A note about the results; I found the average instead of the total for attendance, but you should be able to find the number of fans per win by multiplying the final total on the spreadsheet.
After spreadsheeting the win totals and average attendances, I divided the attendance by the number of wins. Even without including 2001, The Seattle Mariners ended up with the most loyal fans in this calculation. Their score came out to a 42, while Houston had a 41 and Milwaukee came out with a 40. Both of these teams enjoyed playoff success since the last time the Mariners found the post-season. The worst, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Tampa Bay. Despite great win totals in the last few years, few have gone to their games.
0 recs | 22 comments
I'm not sure where you plan to take this, but what you've provided so far falls short of real statistical analysis.
Comparing average attendance to average wins over a ten year span is rather meaningless. Averaging out the numbers over ten years fails to account for any trends, and when you’re attempting to do analysis, what you care about are the trends.
This is a basic outline of the idea (apparently SBNation doesn’t use html formatting, or I can’t figure out how to make html formatting work, so hopefully this isn’t too much of a mess)
Team……….Success…..Attendance……Interpretation
Tampa………>……………..=…………………BAD
Baltimore…..=……………..<…………………BAD
Detroit……….>……………..>…………………Good, but better or worse than expected?
Seattle………<……………..<…………………Bad, but better or worse than expected?
Pittsburgh….=……………..=…………………???
pixburgher - February 7, 2012
Thanks for the feedback.
I used the ten year period because it seems sufficiently long and doesn’t overly account for the Mariner’s record-breaking 2001 season.
There are so many variables (stadium location, front-office relationships, etc) to do a real, complete analysis, but I just wanted to take a quick and simple look at how the Mariners have performed at the gates (which ended up being a long and arduous task by my standards).
Agent_J - February 8, 2012
I don't mean this to sound overly critical
but I have no idea what your spreadsheet is trying to prove. You’re dividing total wins by average attendance, which gives you…I’m not sure what. It gives you a number, yes, but what is that number? What does it mean? Dividing apples by oranges doesn’t really provide useful data.
Don’t forget, also, that attendance is a trailing indicator – it takes a year or so to have attendance truly reflect what’s going on in the stands, especially for a team that has played like the Mariners.
pdb - February 7, 2012
Hey, if we didn't do things like divide apples and oranges, we would never get Tropicana Orange Strawberry Banana juice.
Kenneth Arthur - February 7, 2012
Which is DELICIOUS.
Agent_J - February 8, 2012
The resulting number is the number of fans that come per win
The idea is that it would give the Yankees and Pirates (two ends of the success spectrum) a more even playing field. While the Yankees have done a lot of winning and draw huge crowds, the Pirates haven’t done a lot of winning and don’t do as well.
As for trailing, that’s exactly why I used a ten year period. In that amount of time, each of the ten teams I surveyed ended up with relatively equal win totals over those years (it helped eliminate outliers) and also allowed attendance to reflect win totals (after about three years in most places, from my cursory glance).
I feel like something is being missed here, so if my explanation isn’t making sense, just let me knwo
Agent_J - February 8, 2012
Aside from what's already been mentioned
Keep in mind that there are other factors at play in attendance numbers when it comes to “fan loyalty”. For example Tampa Bay’s stadium is not conveniently located to Tampa Bay so winning alone isn’t going to overcome the fact that fewer people are going to be willing to travel to get there. If you were to measure the local population within a reasonable distance of the actual stadium, I bet they would show a similar response to winning and losing as everywhere else, their stadium is just not really tapping into a big market of people at the moment so attendance will always be low.
OlSalty - February 7, 2012
And the inverse of that of course
the Cubs, Red Sox, and Yankees are right on subway lines, so those parks are easier to get to, even when the team is playing badly it’s no effort at all to get to the park.
pdb - February 7, 2012
How would you recommend I factor these things in?
divide each of the numbers by miles from city center?
If you have a good way to take account of this factor, I’m all ears, but there’s simply too much in play to put a real number to it, from my perspective. And again, while Tampa Bay is out in the boonies, the vast majority of the teams sampled have stadia right in the city. And if people in Tampa Bay aren’t even willing to drive out there for a playoff or play-in, I don’t really think they need the benefit of the doubt.
Agent_J - February 8, 2012
What I'm saying, and what others are saying,
is that the analysis you are trying to do here doesn’t really tell you anything meaningful.
but there’s simply too much in play to put a real number to it
This, over all, is the point many of us are trying to make.
pdb - February 9, 2012
And fan utility factors
-How much is the average ticket?
-What is the distribution in ticket prices?
-What kind, type and frequency of fan promotions/giveaways do teams do?
-What other entertainment options are available as substitute goods?
-What’s the local economy been like?
-Is the city a travel destination?
-Breakdown of single game sales vs ticket packages vs season tickets and the costs/trends of each
-How has the tourist economy been like?
-What are concession prices like? Parking? Transit? Percentage of local populace that uses transit?
-Were there any unusual weather seasons during the studied period? Could that have an impact?
Also, final wins is a bland variable considering that excitement is usually more determined by a team’s odds at a playoff spot, not their final regular season record.
Matthew - February 7, 2012
Fair enough. All of these teams except for the Royals, Orioles and Pirates have been to the playoffs since the Mariners
ticket prices are here, but it doesn’t seem to be a helpful list. It’s immediately clear that box seat prices skew the averages horribly when talking about teams like the Rays, Orioles and Blue Jays. Other than those aforementioned teams, the Mariners are within 3 dollars of the highest team on the list, and higher than seven of them. Baltimore would perhaps take a jump over Seattle based on the ticket prices, based on how it was weighted, but I wouldn’t know where to start in making a fair weight for that variable.
Fan promotions would be both difficult to do and produce inconclusive results. How effective would team towel night be compared to Sonics remembrance night? If I were to include things like this I might as well just make a completely objective list.
Economy would be a good thing to add, and would almost certainly drop Seattle down, considering that our economy is one of the healthiest in the country. Again though, I wouldn’t know where to start, and could use some help factoring such things in. Ditto for travel and tourism. Different sites have completely different numbers (though the east coast is almost universally higher).
For weather patterns, the ten year period should really eliminate such variables. Every city is going to have rough weather at some point or another in that time frame, and most of the cities mentioned are in areas with warm summers or retractable roofs.
Really, while these factors would have an effect on the numbers, I don’t think it would be that noticeable. Perhaps the biggest factor in my mind would be competitors for sports dollars in these markets, but Seattle has had as many or more pro sports than all of these cities save Washington and Houston (Houston’s team was better for longer and more recently than Seattle’s).
Basically what I’m saying is, I’d love to add in all these factors, but I don’t think any of these will significantly change the results. Fact is, the Mariners have been worse for longer than any of these teams and still have a better attendance ratio.
Agent_J - February 8, 2012
What many of us are trying to get across to you is that "attendance ratio" is meaningless and unconvincing.
Matthew - February 8, 2012
Fair enough.
“Meaningless” seems like kind of a strong word though. After all, the formula isn’t all that different from something like OPS+, which just combines other stats into a new number that takes all the involved stats into account. It doesn’t register all the possible variables, like wind direction, humidity, fence depth that day, etc. It’s at tool, not a be-all, end-all. I think that most of us around here would consider the best hitters over a ten year period pretty good hitters.
Agent_J - February 9, 2012
Meaningless is not a value judgment, it's a statement of fact.
The number you are producing in your spreadsheet is essentially meaningless. It has a definition, but not a meaning, if that distinction makes sense.
pdb - February 9, 2012
So to fix that
Would it be simply about assigning values to the above-mentioned variables, or what? How could i make this “meaningful”?
Agent_J - February 9, 2012
I honestly think it is a pointless exercise to try
and again, I don’t mean that as a value judgment in the slightest. I commend you for trying to accomplish something with this, but I think your analysis time would be better spent on a different project, because there are far, far too many variables in play to come to a useful conclusion unless you have unlimited time to spend chasing down all these variables and understanding why they vary, then assigning weights to them, etc.
pdb - February 9, 2012
Thank you for that
But my whole goal is to find exactly where Seattle fans stand in the “fans of crap teams” category. I’m going to put my information in the blog, but I think I’ll have to get rid of the “statistical analysis” label…
Agent_J - February 10, 2012
What about how many people can actually attend a game?
Tropicana Field has a seating capacity of 34,078, Safeco seats 47,878 and Dodger Stadium seats 56,000.
Assuming every game during a season is sold out, attendance looks as follows:
Tampa Bay: 2,760,318
Seattle: 3,878,118
Los Angeles: 4,536,000
It would look like LA clearly outstrips Seattle and especially Tampa Bay (and that Seattle is clearly a bigger supporter of the Mariners than Tampans are of Tampa Bay). But this obviously isn’t true – all cities in question are supporting via attendance to the largest extent possible.
Among the factors mentioned by Matthew, I would also question the ratio of attendance to potential sales. 75%, 50%, 90%, 80%?
harkening - February 7, 2012
I wish I had access to those sales numbers
Though I don’t think I would include them anyway. There would be a few teams (Yankees and Red Sox in particular) that have a TON of bandwagon fans right now that would disappear after a prolonged losing stretch. (This is a big reason why I didn’t take numbers from contenders).
As for capacity, ballparks only reach those numbers when the teams inside are doing well, which again ties into my reasoning for only taking bottom-rung teams. None of those squads I choose had to worry about selling out except in specific, short periods of time within the last ten years.
Agent_J - February 8, 2012
In addition to the above, this is seriously skirting over economic factors.
Attendance remained steady during the Bavasi years despite bad baseball, since Safeco was still relatively new and a great option for family night. There’s no coincidence that it dropped off a cliff after 2008, and continues to stagnate. Bad baseball isn’t the only reason families aren’t coming out to the park anymore.
This is a worthy subject for analysis, but it needs much more nuance than what you’re attempting.
Benne - February 7, 2012
As for the economic factors, all of the teams involved except for the Rays and Orioles (also in a new-ish ballpark) are in new buildings
(Kauffman Stadium in KC has seen some significant renovations as well)
So I don’t think that particular factor is relevant in this case. 1999-2005 saw new ballparks for most of these teams, yet many of them didn’t see a noticeable attendance bump. Pittsburgh was likely the worst offender, as their attendance hasn’t gone up or down more than 3,000 since it was built (similar numbers were posted before the building as well).
Seattle’s honeymoon with the park was, from my (unprofessional opinion) over about the same time they stopped being relevant in the playoff chase. Or, about 2004. I remember reading articles about the new ballpark factor, saying that for neutral teams during their new park building, they got a boost for about five years. That would reflect Safeco as well, though the Mariners were hardly neutral during that time.
Agent_J - February 8, 2012
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