Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles (MLB #12 - Why Do People Go to Baseball Games in LA, but not St. Pete?)

 

Why do people go to baseball games?

I’m not talking about the fuzzy feel-good things like the grace of the players or the pace of the game or the smell of the grass, or even the more subtle things that hook me, like the plethora of statistics. Why do people go to baseball games at Dodger Stadium or Petco Park, but not Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg or the Oakland Coliseum in the early 1970s when the Oakland A’s were the best team in decades?

Being a lover of spreadsheets, I put together a spreadsheet with a whole bunch of items that might influence attendance for each of the 30 MLB teams for the last several years, and then asked Excel to figure out how strongly each thing correlated with attendance.

If your eyes glaze over at talk of statistical methods, skip this paragraph, but back for the results in the next paragraph. For  2018 through 2024, the spreadsheet has each team’s attendance, number of wins, payroll (there are a lot of versions of payroll listings around, but I picked one off spotrac.com, whose categories seem to change by the week), stadium capacity, the year the stadium opened, metropolitan area population (I divided by two for those with two teams), success in the playoffs in the preceding year, number of World Series won in the last 20 years, number of World Series played in in the last 20 years, number of times in the postseason in the last 20 years, and last World Series won. Then I plotted each attribute against attendance, to see which ones correlate more strongly. I also plotted the attendance and the number of wins from the previous year against attendance. COVID makes this harder, because in 2020, there were no spectators at games, fewer games were played, and payrolls were lower, and in 2021, attendance was limited in the early part of the season.

For the four years for which I could look at all the correlations that I wanted to, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023 (there were no spectators at games in 2020 because of COVID), the results were remarkably consistent. In every case, the strongest correlation, in other words, the best way to predict what attendance will be this year, is last year’s attendance. In every case, the second strongest correlation was the team’s payroll. The measures of success, in terms of winning regular season games this year or last year, making the playoffs consistently, or doing well in the playoffs last year, always correlated with attendance, but not nearly as strongly as those top two. In fact, stadium capacity correlated more strongly than any performance measure in two of the four years, in a third it was the number of playoffs made in the previous 20 years, and in the fourth it was the number of games won the previous year.

So if you’re running a baseball team, and you want people to come to your games, the best thing you can do is to make sure they came last year. In one way, that’s nonsensical, but in another, it speaks to the importance of long-term support. The other thing you can do is spend more money on players. It doesn’t seem to matter nearly as much whether they win games as whether you spend money on them. Maybe that gives the fans hope, I don’t know.

What does that have to do with today’s game? The Los Angeles Dodgers lead the major leagues in attendance every year. At least they lead in per-game attendance this year, and have led every one of the previous 10 years (I got bored with clicking through the yearly figures after a while). That means that they’ve got a built-in advantage every year. Plus, they spend a lot of money. Their listed payroll isn’t the highest in baseball, but it is artificially lower than what they’re really paying their players because of the way they structure contracts. Shohei Ohtani, for example, signed a contract that pays him only $2 million to play each year for the next 10 years – but pays him $68 million each of the 10 years after that for having played now. It counts for more than $2 million, but less than $70 million, in most calculations, but I won’t try to go into that, because I don’t understand it all. Finally, Dodger Stadium has a larger capacity than any stadium but Oakland (which comes with a definite asterisk), but the Dodgers are also selling a higher fraction of their seats than anyone else except the Phillies. In fact, the Dodgers are selling more tickets per game than the total capacity of all but 5 MLB stadiums.

The Dodgers do play well, in the sense that they win a lot of regular season games (highest total in the majors for 2018 through 2023), and make the playoffs every year. They’ve only won the World Series once in the last 35 years, which is middle of the pack, and only been to the World Series three times, which is slightly above the middle of the pack. Those three were all in the last 10 years, which should help this year’s attendance. But remember, they were first in the majors in 2014, when they hadn’t been in the World series in a quarter century.

The real question is probably how you move from the middle of the pack to near the top in attendance. The Padres moved from the middle of the pack 10 years ago up to 2^nd last year, when their payroll reached its highest rank in team history. But this year, they’re back down to 4^th in attendance. Last year’s high-paid team failed to make the playoffs, and the payroll is lower after they traded one of their best players (Juan Soto) and another went free agent (Blake Snell). But Petco has an enthusiastic feel, even if the team is winning only half their games. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

On the other hand, the Tampa Bay Rays win a lot of games (4th highest total in the majors for 2018 through 2023), and make they playoffs a lot (they've never won a World Series, although they've made it a couple of times), but they have a low payroll, and their attendance is among the worst in the majors. Will they ever be able to move up in attendance? Would increasing their payroll help attendance, whether or not it helps them win games? 

About Dodger fans

We've always joked about Dodger fans, that they all come in the 3rd inning and leave in the 7th. But those are things you can check with numbers, and the numbers don't bear it out. For the last three games, two in San Diego and one in Los Angeles, I picked a section with about 40 seats (two or three rows in our section), and counted how many people showed up when. In San Diego, in both the upper and lower decks, about 70% of the people showed up after the first pitch. In Dodger Stadium, I counted two sections, and each was only about 20%. So they do show up. However, I don't think anyone had left in San Diego before the end of the game. In LA, with the Dodgers, with one of the most potent offenses in baseball, only two runs behind, less than half the people in each section were there by the bottom of the 9th.

The game

The last time we saw Michael Lorenzen pitch, he was pitching for the Texas Rangers' AAA team in Round Rock, against the Dodgers' AAA team from Oklahoma City. He was in the minors, because he had signed as a free agent too late to get in enough work before the start of the season. He looked sharp in the first three innings, had trouble in the 4th, and didn't make it through the 5th. I wondered whether the early success or the late problems were a better predictor of things to come. Tonight, he pitched for the Rangers. He left after 7 innings, having given up only four hits and one run. Other than a home run, no Dodger runner made it past first. He was sharp.

The Rangers had scored two runs by the time their fifth hitter batted in the top of the first, scored one more in the third, and that was all they needed. After Lorenzen, David Robertson came in to pitch the 8th for the Rangers and made it interesting. Pitching to the last two (i.e., the worst) hitters in the Dodger lineup, he hit one with a pitch and gave up a single to the other, putting the tying run on base with three of the best hitters in the game, Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman, coming up. Robertson struck out all three, and the ninth was pretty uneventful.