MVN - Most Valuable Network

Just some more attendance numbers

Yesterday Chris over at CP - noted the attendance of the Nats 2nd home game didn’t quite live up to the standards set by other teams.  Furor erupted.  Nats Enquirer noted that the Nats second game last year had roughly the same number of people paying to watch from the “cheap seats” (Fine to use that phrase for RFK. For the new park…well not so much).   

If you have been reading OMG for any length of time you know the attendance numbers fascinate me.   Earlier - by looking at the new park attendance for teams from cities of roughly the same population size of DC  - I put the Nats season attendance goal at 2.4 to 2.8 million.   Figure since I had those numbers handy, I’d go ahead and look at what they did at roughly the same time as the Nats.

To be as lenient on the Nats as possible, I looked at the first weekday (Mon-Thurs) game AFTER the first homestand. Here’s what I found for those roughly same-sized cities.

• Rangers:  22,995 - Tues v Detriot
• Philadelphia:  33,294 - Tues v St.Louis
• Houston:  37,939  - Tues v Cubs
• Atlanta:   31,427 - Mon v Reds
• Detroit: 20,340  - Mon v Royals  (may 8th)
• San Fran: 40,930 - Mon v Mets (sellout - sold out for year)
• Seattle: 45,118 - Mon v D-Rays (aug 2nd - opened Safeco after All-Star break)

 What do you see?  Other than the Rangers and Tigers - significantly higher attendances.  (note: I did look around at other opponents at roughly the same time frame just to be sure the Cubs or Mets weren’t bringing in numbers out of line with their regular attendances - they weren’t). That’s not unexpected because the Rangers and Tigers had the lowest increases in comparison with the previous years in total attendance and the lowest overall totals.   2.5 mill (+250K from last year) for the Rangers - though it was the strike year. 2.4 mill (+400K) for the Tigers

I heard some people complain on the comments of CP about how these are cities with baseball tradition, something DC doesn’t have.  Ok then, what about the recently added teams.  How did they do in attendance at a similar time? To give you the most info possible I present both their opening season numbers (to resemble the “new park”) and their 4th season (to resemble the Nats…uhh 4th season)

• 1st Tampa Bay : 31,969 - Mon v Min  
• 4th Tampa Bay : 19,433 - Tues v Bos

• 1st Arizona : 45, 256 - Mon v Fla  
• 1st Arizona : 23,328 - Mon v Fla

• 1st Colorado :  48,768 - Mon v Cubs   
• 4th Colorado : 48,047 - Wed v Phil

• 1st Florida :  43,458 - Tues v Atl
• 4th Florida :  17,453 - Mon v SD

Seems to me that first season makes a bad comparison.   4th isn’t great, these teams have no “new park” incentive, but it’s better.

There are the numbers, draw whatever conclusions you like.

What do I think? Well the numbers, no matter how you look at it, show that the Nats are on the bottom of the attendance figures.  This would seem to indicate that overall attendance is going to be lacking this year.  Now that’s not guaranteed, two of the teams the Nats resembled, the Rangers and the D-Backs bounced back to have perfectly fine attendances for the year.  Of course, both those teams were in first place.   You can’t really compare the Nats to TB or Fla, though, (we hope) Florida fans showing no history of good attendance.  

Personally I think Detroit might be a good bet as a comparison.  True, they had baseball tradition but it had been undermined by years of sucking.   The team that first Comerica year wasn’t very good.   They ended up with a decent, middle of the pack attendance but the increase from the year before was minimal.  That’s probably what the Nats will see, something scraping 2.4 million.  That would be disappointing but understandable.

The question is whether when the Nats get good will the people show up.  In Detroit they have, proving a winner matters more than fancy new digs and you get the feeling that they’ll keep showing up, as long as the team keeps doing ok.  That’s what the Nats want to start, and that’s something we can’t know for years.  It’ll give us something to talk about in the meantime though.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.