This post originally appeared on the Blotch page at the Fort Worth Weekly. To read it on their site : http://www.fwweekly.com/2015/10/06/attendance-just-reflects-the-way-baseball-go/
A local team in a pennant race plus a lovely ballpark should equal big attendance numbers, right?
It’s not quite that simple, actually. Recent articles from the Star-Telegram, the Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, and Texas Monthly
have noted the Texas Rangers' inability to draw huge crowds this season
despite better-than-expected team performance and an exciting chase for
the postseason. Suggested remedies have included adding a roof to Globe
Life Park in Arlington, moving the team to Dallas, and having a witch
doctor and faith healer do a joint séance to exorcise the ghost of Billy
Martin.
The Rangers averaged
30,763 fans as they played 81 regular season home games en route to
winning the American League West Division title in 2015. The figure
ranked 16th in baseball and is lower than last season’s mark of 33,565,
when the team finished 31 games behind the division-winning Angels.
This wins versus attendance ratio perplexes people, because it seems
counter-intuitive. If you win you should draw more fans than when you
don’t, the reasoning goes, since fans enjoy the sensation of aligning
themselves with a winner and also like seeing top-level talent perform.
To a certain extent, that logic works. Indeed, it seems likely the
Rangers have drawn more fans this season than they would have had they
ended up in last place again. Why, though, have they not drawn more fans
than 2014, when injuries doomed them to a finish in the cellar?
A lot of the answer lies in ticket sales cycles. In baseball, the
previous season’s results often determine the next year’s numbers.
That’s because a huge share of a season’s total tickets gets sold in the
offseason when account executives can move a lot at one time. A team’s
season and group ticket representatives sell based on the results of the
previous year. A good season means season ticket and mini-plan holders
enthusiastic to buy, renew, and upgrade. They do so in blocks of 20, 40,
80, and 162 tickets or more at a time. Group ticket buyers, planning
months in advance, choose a ballgame for their church or fight club
instead of some other entertainment option. They buy in blocks of at
least 25 tickets each.
The 2014 sales group had recent postseason appearances from which to
sell, and that’s a handy thing to have. Playoff-less 1997’s attendance
totals exceeded those of the playoff campaigns from the years before and
after it. The year 2000’s figures were better than 1999’s. Occasionally
a team can overcome a sub-par campaign with a special offseason, as
when Nolan Ryan led a slew of roster moves in 1989, or when the new
ballpark opened in 1994. Whatever the reason, success in the
October-March sales window will usually be the most important indicator
of the next season’s attendance numbers, because the largest blocks of
tickets get sold to people who plan ahead before the season.
Of course, individual game sales do go on once the season has begun
and winning can influence those totals. It’s hard, though, for
single-game sales to overcome a mediocre offseason.
We can flag 1974, 1996, and 2004 as notable outliers. Those seasons
all involved surprising young Rangers teams coming off extended periods
without success. This year’s team has some good young players, but they
don’t match the cachet the Jim Sundbergs, Pudge Rodruguezes, and Michael
Youngs from those previous teams had. This will also be the fifth
season in the last six the Rangers have played past game 162, so the
2015 crew doesn’t have the buzz of, say, a 2004 team coming off four
straight last-place finishes or a 1996 squad making the franchise’s
first postseason.
Besides any issues with the on-field product, a couple of factors
conspire against the Rangers ticket sales group as a season goes on:
football and school.
When Cowboys training camp begins in late July, it siphons press
attention from the Rangers. The team enjoys a brief period of media
primacy once the NBA playoffs end, but that advantage disappears when
helmets start hitting shoulder pads. The reduced media exposure doesn’t
help ticket sales. The onset of high school football hurts, too. The
three worst-attended Friday games of 2015 all came in the period after
school began.
In late August, weekday attendance also tends to plummet and it has
nothing to do with the heat. Families make up a huge part of baseball
game attendees and parents simply don’t want to keep kids out late on a
school night, for fear their offspring will fail to excel at school and
get forced into menial professions like blog-writing. Now, we’re not
saying that people should prioritize their children’s education over supporting the ball team, just that the evidence indicates it’s what they do.
Fort Worth schools started class on August 24. After that date, the
Rangers had 11 Monday-Thursday home games. During the same period in
2013 and 2014, they had 8. In their record attendance year of 2012, they
had 9. If you want to win a pennant, you might want to host a lot of
those September games since teams tend to play better at home (though
Texas actually won more games on the road this season). If you want to
draw fans, you want as few of them as possible. The 2015 Rangers have
actually done pretty well on those nights, all things considered.
They’ve only had one such game with attendance below 20,000. A September
16 Dollar Hot Dog Night with Dallas Keuchel pitching for the Astros
drew 34,483, and they drew over 30K the next night, too. By and large,
though, the attendance ceiling is very low on weekday night games once
school has started.
In 2011, with the Rangers franchise coming off its first World Series
appearance and playing its way to another one, the Boston Red Sox came
to town in late August for a Monday-Thursday series. Teams love to see
Boston and the Yankees visit on weekdays, because opposition fans boost
otherwise lackluster crowds. Those Sox had star power, too, with John
Lackey and Josh Beckett starting two games of the series and the likes
of David Ortiz, Adrian Gonzalez, and Carl Crawford in the lineup. It
didn’t matter, because even those guys couldn’t defeat the
first-week-of-school curse. Attendance for the four games averaged just
over 30,000, some six thousand fans a game below that season’s average.
Some in the team’s front office found the dip difficult to comprehend,
and talk of new ad campaigns and ticket specials and starting David
Clyde proliferated. Such remedies wouldn’t have worked, though. Baseball
veterans know such declines are just part of the game.
The Rangers don’t really have a lot to worry about now, either. Their TV ratings
have done well, which indicates there is still a lot of interest in the
club. Mom and Dad just watch on TV instead of going to the game,
because Junior needs to get to bed on time so he won’t flunk another
math test. The team likely will focus on selling postseason tickets,
which are special enough to avoid the weeknight blues, and creating a
plan to convert this season’s achievements into next year’s season and
group ticket buyers.
The Rangers ballpark lease expires in 2024. Some speculate they might
leave behind all the facility improvements they’ve made over the past
few years in favor of relocation to some yet-to-be-built retractable
roof stadium in downtown Dallas. Would such a move improve attendance?
Perhaps it would, although if I were them, I’d want to see a Prince
Fielder-sized pile of research confirming it before I hoofed it east.
But even if the move happened, we can safely guess that sometime around,
say, 2029, we’d read another series of articles (or perhaps have them
implanted directly into our brains by that time) wondering why the
attendance was worse than the previous year’s even though the team was
better. The answer will be the same as it was in 2015, or 2000, or 1997,
or 1979.
Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts
for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns
and related creative projects for sports entities through his company,
Rush Olson Creative & Sports.
RushOlson.com
Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports
Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports
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