Some good news: Attendance
It wouldn’t be fair to harp on the attendance issues early and not mention the crowd last night. Now, do I want to be fair to the Nats? Eh. But I made a death-bed promise to a dying great aunt twice removed to always give both sides of the argument in regards to baseball attendance issues, and dammit if I’m going to let ol’ Martha down.
32,780
Naysayers will say it was the Mets and/or the weather, and surely both had something to do about it. Last year’s first home game against the Mets was roughly the same time of month (April 27th) and roughly the same crappy team playing (7-15 entering that game) and it drew only 21, 662. And that was a Friday - followed up by a 29, 292 on Saturday. The Nats didn’t get within 5K of this attendance for a weekday game until a Cubs series around July 4th. That’s a good number.
One thing to think about is that it might be a Johan Santana thing, but we only have to wait about 8 hrs to see if that’s the case.
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4 Responses to “Some good news: Attendance”
April 25th, 2008 at 8:49 am
Of course weather and opponent play into it, but so what? 32,780 is 32,780. The tickets don’t bring in less revenue or come with a “sunny day” tax. Yes, it might skew comparisons, but the reality is, given the possibility of a good game, on a nice day, the Nats can draw a crowd. That’s important - it shows they have a base of fans willing to come to the park. Put together a compelling team, and they will come. If the Nats had drawn 19,000, that’s reason to worry, because that means even against a top team, on as nice a day as you can have, you can’t draw. Sure, some of the 32,780 wasn’t there solely because they are die hards, but the reality is no park in the league fills up on die hards. You need those fair weather, fair team fans to fill the seats.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:17 am
And last night was 29K+ another good crowd. This is what the Nats wanted/needed to see, more toward the 2.8 million end of expectations that I had at the year’s beginning. Now the team just needs to be good enough to keep them coming.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:20 am
I think the reality is the Nats need to be good either next season, the season after, or at the latest, the season after that. If not, they start to become a joke and after thought. That’s when you lose the some die hards AND most of the casual fans.
Now, if the team could just spread those 10 runs more evenly, I think they’d be somewhat OK.
Harper - can you explain whey this offense, with some potential pop and good hitters and in a smaller park, seems to be struggling. I’m willing to believe that the big park played with the guys mentally (though strange but true - baseball used to be played in parks like that, shocking I know, also, it affects both teams the same way, just play baseball and stop worrying), but now, even in the small park, the team doesn’t seem to be hitting. Is there a home/away divergence I’m missing, or is this O not hitting, even at home, like I think.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:47 am
It’s everything.
The approach the players are taking is not great (CP has gone over this to death)
They are getting unlucky with a low BABIP and low BA (.269 I think?) with RISP. (in the .230s).
The lineup right now (well as of two games ago) is producing in an odd fashion where the guys on top are slugging, but not getting on base, the guys in the middle are getting on base but not slugging and the guys on the bottom were doing nothing.
If you assumed that Church/Milledge would be a wash somewhat, the expected improvement was going to come from C and LF, neither of which have panned out so far.
The bench had been a big fat zero.
Noone had taken a step up in power as was hoped for (there’s a reason for that but work is too busy to go into it right now).
NOTHING had gone right for the Nats offensively outside of Guzman’s slugging and Milledge doing ok. Unfortunately Guzman was hitting first all that time.
PLUS we can’t assume that the park is going to be a good hitters park. We can only assume its going to be a better HR park than RFK. but with a team geared toward alley doubles, a smaller park might actually be a hinderance.
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