THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

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:

1. I flagged each team’s winning percentage as “420” if they had a winning percentage of .462 or lower.  I flagged each team’s winning percentage as “580” if they had a winning percentage of .538 or higher.  And, “500” for a winning percentage between those two.  With about 1500 team-seasons, there were about 500 seasons in each class.  Basically, you either had a bad, average, or good season.

2. I averaged out each team’s attendance by their winning percentage class.  This is the Dodgers in LA through 1976:
22,215 attend420
24,526 attend500
28,461 attend580

So, they averaged 28,461 fans when they were a good team, and 22,215 when they were a bad team.

3. I normalized their attendance based on them having a .500 record.  Since teams with an average record have historically drawn 25% more fans than teams with a bad record, and since teams with a good record have drawn 25% more fans than teams with an average record, I use those numbers as the adjustment.  The 22,215 fans with a bad record are increased by 25%, while the 28,461 fans with a good record are decreased by 25%. 

We see by the way that this 25% shouldn’t really apply to the Dodgers.  Dodger fans will support a team, much better than the average city.  Their adjustment numbers historically are less than 10%.  But, honest mess and all.

Anyway, after the adjustment, we see that the average Dodger game through to 1976, if they were a .500 team, was 25,021 fans.

4. I repeat this for all teams and all eras, and I get this:

As noted earlier, attendance basically increased by 40-45% from one era to the next era.  The Dodgers did explode from the through-1976 era to the 1977-1986 era like the rest of MLB, but that’s where they plateaued.

The Chicago Cubs are one team that has gained huge favor over the decades.  They were 11th in 1946-1976 (against, after adjusting for their poor record) to 6th in the current era.

You’ll note that there are two lines for the Expos.  From 1998 to the time they folded, their attendances woes was something unrelated to the fanbase.  We see that through 1976, they were a bit above average, with 15,514 adjusted fans.  From 1977-1986, they were pretty much average with 21,161 fans.  But, then they plateau-ed, and indeed, dropped, with 18,873 fans.

While four cities plateaued (Expos, Royals, Dodgers, Angels), most cities exploded in attendance starting in 1987. Basically, it can presumed that there not much more that those cities can do to find new fans.

5. What I also did was a timeline adjustment, by doubling the fans from 1946-1976 and adding 40% to the fans of 1977-1986.  The idea is that since that’s what happened to the league, let’s apply that for all the teams.  (Again, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to do, since I just finished saying it looked like the Dodgers plateaued already.  But, let’s have some fun while we are here.)

A few interesting points:
- current incarnation of Washington is doing much better than the past ones… again, since I didn’t control for expansion and my timeline adjustment may not be the best, who knows…

- different incarnations of Milwaukee and KC are similar

- the two cities that have a good fan base don’t have a team: Brooklyn and Montreal… given a decent situation, each city can support a team

- Oakland and Tampa are probably the two teams that may benefit the most from a new ballpark

6. Anyway, best way to use this chart is to look at the base numbers (in either step 5 above, or the 1987_2009 in step 4), and treat that as a city’s “.500 team” fan support.

Then, in order to figure out how much fan support you can expect, add 2% for each win over 162 games.  So, if you are a .580 team (94 wins, or +13 wins above average), you add 26% to the base number.  Similarly, drop 2% for each win below average.

Again, like I said, this is just a general rule.  The Dodgers, for example, would likely only add 1% for each win, since their fans are not fickle.

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If anyone wants to clean up this mess, feel free.