Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Marlins Attendance: 2013 Post-Mortem

It was back in February the Biz of Baseball's Maury Brown made a few bold predictions on the Marlins' 2013 attendance:
Brown didn't disappoint.  The Marlins failed to sell out a single game and their 19,584 per-game average represented a more than 30% drop in attendance from their ballpark's 2012 debut, surpassing even the Devil Rays' 30% drop in 1999 (1.7 million total fans, down from 2.5 million fans in 1998).

I'll also take some credit here, predicting the Marlins could meet Brown's benchmarks "and still draw more fans than the Rays."  As discussed on this blog last week, the Rays were the only team to average fewer fans per game than the Marlins in 2013 (although the wild card-winning Indians came close).

Finally, just to add some insult to injury, Brown pointed out it looked like the Marlins were about to sell souvernir tickets following Henderson Alvarez' no-hitter...AND COUNT THEM AFTER-THE-FACT AS PAID ATTENDANCE:
Brown reports that the team did this in 2010 as well when Roy Halladay no-hit the Marlins, but it seems like MLB made sure history would not repeat itself again in this case:
Now, if it can only make sure history doesn't repeat itself again at the ticket office in 2014...

3 comments:

  1. Great work Noah. A good thing you pointed out the Marlins attendance problems. People were starting to pay attention to the Rays abysmal attendance. I also bet the Marlins abysmal attendance had 0 to do with the massive off season sell off.

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  2. Excellent followup Noah.
    So once again facts and numbers prove that hyped-up stadium salespitches are the worthless cash ripoffs that we all know them to be.

    But even with proof of new, tax-swindled new stadiums not affecting attendance, hysterical sports fans will cry and moan at the idea of not handing a blank check to billionaire owners with zero strings attached.

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  3. I agree. It is proven. If a team has the mother of all sell off offseasons attendance will plummet.

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