It is built. Has been built for some time. Are the people still coming?
This is one of the questions I want to answer. I watched Randy Johnson’s 300th win on TV and even though the weather was as awful as it has been all summer in D.C. – the joint was empty.
Seemed like they were coming up until a couple of years ago. On Oct. 2, 2007 Major League Baseball announced a single-season record paid attendance of 79,502,524 surpassing the previous year’s record for the fourth consecutive campaign. Allan H. did not cancel the World Series that day. Instead, he was quoted as saying, “By any measure, this is a golden age for Major League Baseball.”
There was no such press release in October 2008. In fact, paid attendance was down 1.15% league-wide on the whole (78,591,116 or thereabout) and down .78% on average per game. That doesn’t quite hang together for me. Yes, gas prices spiked in the summer, but the heavy stuff didn’t come down until mid-September, there were lifts in the graveyards in Tampa and Washington, and the National League was an exciting, hot mess right up until the end.
However, 16 teams saw drops in overall paid attendance and 15 in average/game. Cincinnati saw a Razor Shines-thin bump. Gravity seemed to vector west as San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, Texas, and Oakland all saw drops of at least 11% in both categories.
According to the Team Marketing Report , ticket prices rose on average by 10.9% for the 2008 season and the Fan Cost Index (FCI), which is a measure of the cost to attend a game including parking, souvenirs, food/drink for a family of four rose 7.9% on average in the 2008 season. There may be a correlation of affordability to draw here.
The mid-aught’s sure seem like the Roaring ’20′s compared to today. Deflated by the first burst bubble and September 11th, attendance slumped 6.4% in 2002, but was flat in 2003 before it started its climb like a boli-fueled home run toward the golden age. In 2009 so far, the numbers suggest another cycle down.
It is admittedly unfair to extrapolate completely in this unscientific forum because the 2009 major league season is not quite half over. Excluding economic factors, the main negative has been the weather in the east. Countering that are the races where the largest lead is six games and only three teams are worse than 8 games below .500 as of post time.
Through the same number of games played in 2008 based on where each team is as of June 29, 2009, Baseball Reference reports that only 10 teams are up in average per game. Florida enjoys the largest year-over-year increase at 22.2% (Fan cost index up 6.6%) and Washington’s attendance rank resembles its won/loss at -23.3% (FCI +32%). It is worth noting though that first-place Detroit is down 22% as well with FCI up 2.9%, just below the MLB average of 2.9% in 2009.
This superficial look at the numbers is a catalyst for this effort. What will the fans say later this month on the Roadie? They seem to be coming to the park less, but are they coming more than they did earlier in the season? Are they spending less when they get there? Will they not notice inflation in peanuts and cracker jacks? Will they care if they ever get back?
Get back to where they once belonged.