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Thursday, November 17, 2011
Is signing a new star player like building a new stadium: you get fans to come for the novelty?
Dave shows some recent players and their team’s attendance. Basically, under the “perfect storm” scenario, you get a Junior signing that boosts attendance by 25%. Otherwise, you’ll get a range of zero to 10% (ARod) increase.
Now, we need something to compare that too. After all, are people coming for the novelty of the new player, or because the team is winning more. The basic rule of thumb is that every win adds 2% to your attendance total. If a player adds 3 to 5 wins to a team’s total, we’d expect to see a jump of 6% to 10% to its team’s attendance. And this is EXACTLY WHAT WE SEE!
That is, there is neither a marquee draw, over and above whatever win-talent that player has, nor is there even a short-term one-year novelty boost.
This guy is basically the exception that proves the rule:
The Reds got the biggest boost after acquiring Junior, but that was basically the perfect storm of a situation – he was a local hero whose Dad had starred for the franchise, and was the most marketable baseball player on the planet at the time. Perhaps no team could ever pitch their fans a more attractive acquisition than Griffey “coming home” to play in Cincinnati and follow in his father’s footsteps. The pitch worked, and they drew an additional half million fans in his first year with the Reds.
It’s worth noting, however, that the burst was extremely short lived. The Reds won 85 games in Griffey’s first year, but the fans didn’t stick around in 2001, and their attendance dropped back to 1.88 million, lower than it was the year before they acquired him.
Wins is what draws fans, not names.
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