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Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Attendance base for each team
There have been several great articles that track attendance by city over time, and controls for such factors as expansion, new ballpark, past won-loss record. The article I am writing below is not going to be one. That’s because I don’t control for any of those three key parameters. There was an excellent article written a few years back in the Phil-edited By The Numbers. If you want something good, read that one.
What I’m going to do here will establish the framework, and then some aspiring saberist can improve upon it.
Let me tell you what I did, and why I did it. The why will always be the same answer: because it was easy. I choose the honest mess because I don’t want to spend more than a few minutes doing what I’m doing, and by leaving it honest, you can clean up the mess if you want to. Or not. Indeed, I will spend more time writing this article than doing the actual research.
There are three eras for baseball, in terms of attendance. There is 1946-1976, where the per-game attendance was around 14,000 fans, give or take a few thousand each year. There is 1987-present, where the per-game attendance was around 28,000 fans, give or take a few thousand each year. And there was the transition period of 1977-1986, as baseball’s fandom rose from one plateau to the next. Why this happened, I will leave to the historians. I will note that I became a baseball fan right around 1977, and a regression equation will therefore conclude that I am completely responsible. Which is why I hate regression equations.
Free agency and money was probably the real reason. People like to see valuable things, and if you pay alot for someone, then people will want to see that player. It’s like McNall said when he and Gretzky bought the Honus Wagner card: you buy the most important card, and you pay top dollar, and that drives its value. This is true even for small things, like books. When we had to price our book, we thought about pricing it for 9.99$, but there was a theory that if you priced your book too low, it couldn’t be valuable! Indeed, the lower we wanted to price the book, the less units it would sell apparently. A comedian had a joke about his father buying a VCR (old joke), and it was priced at 99$, and the father told the salesman he wanted to pay 49$ for it. The salesman was so flustered with the back-and-forth, he told the father to take it for 19$. And the father said “19$? What’s wrong with it?”.
Anyway, historians and comedians and economists have a better handle on this than I do. Listen to them, and ignore me on why circa 1977 was pivotal.
Ok, what I did:
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