THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Seems reasonable - except for the last sentence. The loyalty of the fan-base is always relevant as it will affect the sale price of the team.

But won’t the top 5 attendance days for bad teams come when they’re playing big market teams who are having good seasons.  For example, I live in Washington and the most of the games that sold out before this year were games against the Phillies.

Follow-up: there was an interesting article in JQAS about this.

I don’t see how you’re estimating a causal link. If attendance responds to the expected quality of a game, or because good pitchers are going that night, or because the Yankees are in town, etc, etc, then your estimates aren’t telling you about how attendance affects wins.

The JQAS study, warts notwithstanding, is at least trying to estimate the right effect.

Andy: did you see ALL of the conditions I placed in my blog post?  Did you see how I said it was quick, and FWIW, and how I said there were other biases? Excuse me for reposting a quick study I did from 7 years ago into a blog post.

Apologies, Tom, if I came off harshly. It’s good to know that raw correlations do not find much relationship between attendance and wins.

Andy, cool.  I don’t mind harshness, if it’s deserving.  Your post ignored what I said, to say whatever you wanted to say.

Anyway, thanks for your note back, and let’s move forward.

I think it’s fairly obvious that the general conclusion from previous studies that state “winning draws fans” isn’t entirely true, or at the very least does not apply to all franchises.

Location seems to be as, if not more, important than winning. Note: Chicago v. Tampa Bay.

Is there any reason that TB should NOT be leading the MLB in attendance? Is there team not young and exciting? Are they not in an ayttractive division? Do they not have star players? Have they not won in recent years? Is the stadium that crappy that fans will choose to stay away? Are ticket prices that high?

Now, take the Cubs and ask the opposite of all those questions.

@Circlechange - I think you’re forgetting the market a team plays in here.  When someone says “winning drives attendance”, they’re not talking about winning’s relationship on aggregate attendance, they’re talking about factors that have an affect on the change in attendance.

Tampa Bay attendance rankings:
2010: 23
2009: 23
2008: 26
2007: 29
2006: 29

So when someone says “winning drives attendance”, TB fits that model - since they started winning, they’ve seen a positive change in attendance, because what they’re really saying is winning is the primary factor in attendance changes, rather than total attendance.

Has anyone studied whether missed ball-strike calls (based on Pitch F/X) are more likely to benefit the home team, and if so by how many calls per game on average?

IF there is a home field effect on ball-strike umpiring, it would be interesting to test if the magnitude of the effect has any correlation with attendance.

Butler Blue;

Most or all of the attendance increase when the Phillies play in Washington is Phillie fans coming from Philly to the game.  So any attendance model has to consider distance to the city of the visiting team.