The Monkey Cage

If you look here, you’ll see that baseball attendance per game has dramatically increased over time. If you look here, you’ll see that seven teams set all-time attendance records this past season.

Jesse is correct about attendance. There are lots of famous examples; there were 23K people at the game where Maris hit his 61st HR, and only 19K people were at Yankee Stadium for his 60th — in fact, the Yankees averaged 21.5K that year, good for best in the league, compared to the 19.5K the 2008 worst-in-the-league Royals averaged. Other indicators (such as games on TV) are strong as well. (Baseball-reference.com has all the info).

Oh, and I don’t have a citation, but at least as of the mid 1990s it wasn’t true that player movement had increased; that’s just, or at least mainly, a combination of nostalgia and selective memory.

Not to mention that baseball was great pre-1958 if you lived in the small section of the nation that had MLB; having a small number of teams is great if you have one, but tough luck if you lived west or south of St. Louis (Milwaukee was added in 1953), or really anywhere other than the ten cities that made up the majors.

Oh, and the players have been druggies since at least the 1950s, and anyone who believes that it’s a situation unique to baseball is nuts.

No question that football has become very popular, and to each their own, but I’ll take the modern, more popular than ever version of baseball.

A rant deserves a rant…

Jesse is correct about attendance. There are lots of famous examples; there were 23K people at the game where Maris hit his 61st HR, and only 19K people were at Yankee Stadium for his 60th — in fact, the Yankees averaged 21.5K that year, good for best in the league, compared to the 19.5K the worst-in-the-league 2008 Royals averaged. Other indicators (such as games on TV) are strong as well. (Baseball-reference.com has all the info).

Oh, and I don’t have a citation, but at least as of the mid 1990s it wasn’t true that player movement had increased; that’s just, or at least mainly, a combination of nostalgia and selective memory.

Not to mention that baseball was great pre-1958 if you lived in the small section of the nation that had MLB; having a small number of teams is great if you have one, but tough luck if you lived west or south of St. Louis (Milwaukee was added in 1953), or really anywhere other than the ten cities that made up the majors.

Oh, and the players have been druggies since at least the 1950s, and anyone who believes that it’s a situation unique to baseball is nuts.

No question that football has become very popular, and to each their own, but I’ll take the modern, more popular than ever version of baseball.

As Adam Smith said, it’s better to observe what people do than to ask them what they think. Hence attendance figures cited by Jesse above carry more wait. Baseball is still #1 at the gate. Football is #1 in TV contracts.

Last first: Nelson, perhaps you have noticed that baseball teams play 162 games per season. Football teams play — what? — 16.

Jesse and Jonathan: Games used to be played predominantly during the day, making it impossible for fans to attend. Do you have any figures comparing day games to day games and night games to night games?

Jonathan: I’m aware of those figures on player movements. I dont have statistics, but my strong sense is that the franchise-type players — the stars — are considerably more mobile now than they used to be. (I could be wrong of course, and I’m certainly not immune to nostalgia and selective memory.)

And Jonathan: On your point that pre-1958 (earlier, really — the Browns moved before ‘58) it was hard to be a fan: (1) No it wasn’t. I grew up in a little town out on the prairie. It was easy to be a fan. You just turned on the radio and listened to the Game of the Day. (2) To follow your logic, if it’s so much easier to be a fan today than it used to be, baseball should have become the favorite sport of more people, not fewer.

Oops. Withdraw my first response, which is off-point.

Now if Americans were interested in watching and playin a real game like Gaelic football, soccer or rugby, the American football problem wouldn’t arise (baseball, fwiw is just a dumbed down version of cricket imo)

Day games/night games: I don’t have much on that, but I’d say that once they had the technology & the lights, which certainly was by the end of the War, then they probably only played day games because they thought that it would make them more money. At any rate…looking at just the NL, attendance grows slowly to a peak of ~8K/game in 1930, stays flat until after the war when it spikes up to ~15K/game, then again stays basically flat until 1975 (when it’s 17K/game), and then starts growing again to the present day record 34K/game. It’s real hard for me to see lights as a big factor there.

On player movement: there have always been guys who stayed with one team forever (Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, B. Williams); guys who had very split careers (Hoyt, Gordon, Maris, Clemens); and guys who mainly played for one team, but not their whole career (Ruth, Ruffing, Berra, and probably one of Posada, Jeter, or Rivera, but not yet!). That’s just the Yankees; there have been plenty of long-term teammate combos recently, such as Smoltz/Glavine/Maddux (and Jones and Jones), or the Tigers IF of the 1980s, or Bagwell and Biggio.

Last point: I didn’t say it was hard to be a fan, just that far fewer people could go to games, or had a major league team in their city.

A few points in favor of today’s game. First, I think the era of moving teams (1953-1972, IIRC) really stunk; I suspect that part of the run up in attendance beginning in the mid-1970s was the end of musical franchises.

Second, free agency and other changes have meant far better competitive balance.

Third, integration (which took about 20-30 years to be complete) and globalization have dramatically improved the quality of play.

And, fourth, technology has helped a lot; yes, one could listen to games on the radio, but now I can listen to the Giants here in Indiana, or any other radio broadcast of any team for a few pennies a day, plus see lots of games through various outlets, plus follow games and get enormous amounts of information.

(Why, yes, I have a big stack of papers to grade. How did you know?).

Jonathan: I have no papers to grade, so I’ll give it one more iteration.

Okay: More fans now live closer to a major league team, and on average (i.e., if you don’t live in Miami) attendance is up. Fine. I continue to see the day-night distinction as important here. In the olden days (ah, I remember them well), you couldn’t take the kids to a weekday game because they were in school, and it was hard for Dad to go because he was at work, and Mom probably didn’t want to go anyway. Now it’s a family outing. (And an expensive one at that!) Moreover, I’ll continue to press the point that presence does not seem to have made the heart grow fonder. It’s football, not baseball, that has captured the nation’s attention. Attendance aside, that must show up in stuff like TV ratings for NFL v. MLB games, just as it does in the Gallup Poll data that I graphed. So: Just admit that I’m right and go back to grading your papers; your students will love you for it and so will I.

Sure, night games are good for the box office — I’m just saying that they probably were more responsible for propping up sagging attendance in the 1940s-1960s than they were for exploding attendance after ~1975 — there’s not much of a change in day/night after that point.

As to the other point, it is certainly true that the NFL has grown in popularity, but I don’t think it’s at baseball’s expense.

Jonathan: The 40s-60s are exactly the period I’m talking about; I am very old, and that’s my base of comparison.

A couple of minor points: (1) Racial integration in MLB seems to be a thing of the past, at least insofar as African Americans are concerned; Sports Illustrated did a good piece on this a while ago. Of course, the percentage of Latino players is way up. (2) I think the virtues of free agency would be more apparent to a Yankees fan than to, say, a Twins fan.

Just wanted to point out that the Yankees won 20 titles in 40 years from 1923 to 1962. They won 29 pennants between 1921 and 1964. That must have been fun for fans of the other teams.

Lee, you’ve gone too far. Consider your last point (2). Assume the Twins start in 1961 and the New York Yankees start in 1913. Further assume that free agency starts in 1975. Then we have the following:

The Twins won no World Series prior to free agency, and two afterwards.

The Yanks won world series in 20 of 62 pre-free agency seasons (24%) and in 6 of 34 free agency seasons (15%).

The Twins have had more success under free agency; the Yankees have had less. It’s no contest.

Eric, you need to remember that there were only 16 teams for much of the pre-free-agency period, and as many as 30 teams afterwards.

Jesse, I am aware of that. But if I’m a fan of a team, I’m most concerned about winning the World Series. Why should I care about the number of teams?

Jessse: Actually, those were great years to be fans of other teams. Think about the teams that for decades now have had the most dedicated fans. Gotta be the Cubs and the Red Sox. Losing perennially bound them together, gave them a sense of community, and for the Red Sox at least, a common enemy.

Eric, Eric, Eric: Are you really the same person who teaches our research design class? That “evidence” is so weak I don’t even know where to start. But take the Twins, who won the World Series twice during that period. They got some good young players, won, their good young players went to high rollers, and the Twins went into the dumps. They started all over again and, fortunately for them, got some good young players. Meanwhile, the Yankees just keep buying talent (and sometimes overaged and/or overrated talent). Anyway, your quasi-experimental design has so many time-related confounds in it that you should know better.

Lee: Baseball is #1 in gate revenue. Football tickets cost 10x more than baseball tickets?

Lee, apparently you did not read your co-blogger’s “compared to what” post. Here’s the link:

http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/01/compared_to_what.html

The Yankees buy talent now under free agency. They bought talent prior to free agency. A Yankee fan with a sense of history and a modicum of common sense (granted, that might be a trivial number) would understand that no matter the labor system, the Yankees have been advantaged.

On the Twins, you have an interesting interpretation of history. Their 91 WS team was not particularly young. Name one “good young player” from that team that went to a “high roller” and contributed. Please also account for the extra draft picks obtained by the Twins when free agents past their prime sign with other teams. Show your work. If the Twins fans should be upset anything during the free agency period, it should be about being forced to watch games in a hefty bag.

Jeeze Louise, all I’m doing here is trying to have a perfectly good rant, and I’m surrounded by houseflies stinging me “yes, but”s. Shoo, shoo.

Eric, I suppose I should not come up with attendance statistics at the Twins’ two stadiums to show you that attendance is now higher, which obviously and definitively establishes that fans love to go there because we can’t trust survey data, only hard numbers. And now that I’ve said that, you’ll probably come up with attendance figures that show the exact opposite, but don’t bother because I don’t care — I just want to rant. And that goes for the rest of you too.

Chuck Knoblauch was on the ‘91 twins team-young all star who the Twins lost to the Yankees-though quite a few years after ‘91 I think. Scott Erikson-a good pitcher and an all star once or twice I believe was traded to the Orioles b/c Minnesota knew they couldn’t keep him. Erikson was a stud on that ‘91 team. And Jack Morris-not a young player to be sure-moved onto the Blue Jays and helped them win World Series.

Lee, I have a simple approach for you to employ to regain your love of baseball. First, pick a franchise that does things right and has avoided the excesses of the sport in recent years (in my case, an easy choice, my local Twins). Second, ignore what happens off of the field, because a lot of wonderful things happen on the field every day. Result: I love professional baseball, and you can, too!

Jason: Ignoring the fact that he wasn’t young, Jack Morris started 4 games in the post season for the Blue Jays in 1992, went 0-3, and gave up 19 earned runs in 23 innings. If by helped, you mean he didn’t take over the team plane after his lousy game 5 start and crash it on the way to Atlanta, I’ll agree with you.

Knobby stayed with the Twins 6 more years, making the all star team 3 times in that span. He was traded to the Yankees, where he never made the all star game and lost the ability to throw the ball to first base. Two of the four players the Twins traded Knobby for made the all star game once.

In 1995, after 3 years of mediocre pitching, the Twins traded Erickson, who had his best season ever in 1991, for two players who did not pan out. Erickson was an effective pitcher for the O’s for a few years, but the O’s may have questioned the 5 year deal they signed him to, since he sat out two of the five seasons in their entirety due to injuries. I remember the Twins being not to sad to see him go.

Lee: I’ll stay out of the way of your rant. I’ll just point out that you are right that more people now attend Twins games than in the past. Their relative attendance (compared to the rest of the league) is much lower now than it was in the Met, especially the early days of the Met, when they were regularly in the top 3 in attendance.

Something that no one has mentioned is that baseball is horribly overexposed on television as well. Games, multiple games, are available most every night.

I grew up in a major league city, Houston, in the 1960s and we had one game per week on NBC, no local broadcasts. I listened as much as I was allowed on the radio, I read about the team daily in the newspaper, and we went to 2-4 games per year at the Astrodome.

The Saturday games, the all star games, the World Series were all major events in part because you never saw all of those great players.

That added to the bloggers points about length of games helps explain the survey results. In comparison football is primarily a one day a week, event. I find football too boring to watch as well, but I know guys who turn on the tube at noon and hardly get out of the chair until the night game is over. In part this also explains the interest in NASCAR.

Eric: Morris won 21 games for the Blue Jays that year. If that doesn’t count as helping them win the series by being an important part of getting them there, I don’t know what does. I think the Blue Jays were happy to have him that year. And the Twins would have been too.

In Erikson’s first four (full) years with the Orioles, he was 13-12, 16-7, 16-13, and 15-12. Additionally, and I remember this as an Oriole fan who watched quite a few games during those years, he was an innings eater, regularly going deep into games and saving the bullpen. He lobbied hard for a four man rotation so he could pitch more. I just don’t believe the Twins wouldn’t have wanted this output over that period.

Knoblauch, okay, I’ll give you-the Yankees could have done better with the money from his contract. More recently, though, I think the Twins would have liked to have kept a guy named Johan Santana.

Anyway, I have to side with Lee on the larger point that small market teams lose their talent and that this, overall, is bad for the game. The Royals are a particularly good/bad example, having to trade away-or lose via free agency-players like Johnny Damon, Migel Tejada, Carlos Beltran, and Jermaine Dye in their primes (and these are just off the top of my head). Now, they’re reduced to being basically a minor league team.

Lee: should you want to give baseball another chance, I fully agree with Steve’s comments. I’d only add that if you like baseball on the radio, mlb.com offers every radio broadcast for every team all season long for $15.

Jason: the last eight WS winners included Boston twice, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philly…and St. Louis, Miami, and Phoenix. The last eight Super Bowl champs included Boston three times, New York…and Pittsburgh twice, Indy, and Tampa. I’m not seeing a big difference there. Baseball’s Tampa reached the WS last year, and Denver was there the year before. Yes, bad teams tend to let good players go, but that applies to large market bad teams as well as small market bad team, and it’s often a good strategy to do so rather than a sign that the team can’t compete. People have studied it, and at best there’s a very small “big market” effect.

I can’t let anything drop so here it goes. Your list of the last 8 World Series winners come from big markets except Florida. BUT Florida bought that team via free agency despite not really being able to afford it. Compared that to the NFL where Pittsburgh (a city whose baseball team is basically a minor league team) won two of the last three or four superbowls. The bottom line is that anyone can win in football and one’s not surprised. In baseball, if a small market team makes noise it’s a man bites dog story. I would be interested to read the studies you cite.

the solution to all these problems: remember that professional baseball is played at other levels in this country, not just in the major leagues.

i take my son to our local triple-A games with some frequency, and we have a blast. on the cheap, at that.

oh, and to Jason M. two words: salary cap. revenue inequities are prevented - or at least somewhat prevented - from translating into competitive inequities.

rather than pouring their extra revenue into talent, as the yankees do, the stinky-whiners and their ilk are forced to be content simply making more money.

“…remember that professional baseball is played at other levels in this country, not just in the major leagues” — Joel

Good point, Joel.

1. For the past several years, I’ve averaged one major league game (well, arguably major league game — it’s the Washington Nationals I’m talking about) per year and one minor league (Delmarva Shorebirds) game per year. Guess which experience is substantially more enjoyable? No question about it: Gimme the Shorebirds every time.

2. When I tell people where I grew up and the conversation turns to baseball, they say “Well, how could you have loved baseball? You didn’t have a team.” And I say, “Oh, yes I did: the Watertown Lake Sox.” And they sneer, fools that they are. The Braves scout I used to sit with claimed that this was Triple-A level baseball. We had Dick Radatz and Ron Perranoski on the mount and Dick Howser at short. And the longest homerun I’ve ever seen was by Frank Howard, playing for Rapid City

Jason: Phoenix and St. Louis are both small (or perhaps medium/small) markets. The link to Mike Jones’s compilation seems to have died, and it’s not as easy as one might think to factor in the things that matter, but those are both safely smallish (smaller than Miami, IIRC).

Joel: salary caps are not about competitive balance; they’re about dividing revenue between players and management (as is the draft of new talent). Indeed, I’ve seen the case made convincingly that baseball’s current revenue sharing system has been bad for competitive balance.

All: yes, minor league baseball is fun (I’ve been to more minor league games than majors in my life), but it’s actually a part of baseball that doesn’t work as well as it should — see Bill James’s old essay, which I think was in the last Abstract and entitled “Revolution.”

The classic, but now dated, study of the effects of market size was by Andrew Zimbalist; I’m pretty sure that Ron Johnson did a study, but I can’t seem to find a link to it. The Zimbalist finding was that marginal revenues per win did not vary by market size, but I think that had changed a bit more recently.

Dr. Bernstein, yes, salary caps do dictate what percentage of revenue goes to players. But they also cap salaries … which all other things being equal should lead to something approaching competitive balance under the condition that teams spend up to the cap or close to it.

But to my knowledge baseball doesn’t have a “revenue sharing system” (i.e. salary cap) at all, which was my point (apologies if I’m mistaken). The NFL does, thus my contention that it is this difference that allows Pittsburgh to win in football, but not baseball.

Also, whatever may be broken about the minor league systems, it ain’t the game/fan experience, at least not at fabulous Dell Diamond.

And finally, the salary inequities of late in major league baseball seem facially to dwarf those at any time in the past. The Yankees’ payroll is something scarily close to 10x that of the Rays, for example. So, while it may be true that market size has not historically correlated to wins (I don’t know any different) … I would be shocked if that is true for, say, the last 5-10 years.

Two points: (1) the salary cap in baseball is a joke b/c teams surpass it and pay a luxury tax; (2) tell Kansas City and Pittsburgh that St. Louis and Phoenix are small markets. If I get tenure I’m going to have to branch out into this area of research and write a paper specifically on measuring market size. Maybe I’ll prove myself wrong, who knows.

Amen on the minor league baseball. The Akron Aeros put on a great experience. I remember seeing Grady Sizemore go 4-5 a few years back.

Just an update: I did some searching for articles on the intermingling of winning (“competitive balance” seems to be the phrase), the availability of free agents, and market size/franchise wealth, suggesting a good title: “The Wealth of Franchises” (sorry).

Anyway, there’s not much evidence in favor of my argument (I’m relying on the abstracts b/c I can’t get to full text versions of these journals either through J-Stor or my institution’s access to electronic versions of journals). Schmidt and Berri (Review of Industrial Organization 2002) note there there is no “consistent” (again, I can’t get more specific than this) relationship between market size and competitive balance. Schmidt and Berri (Journal of Sports Economics 2005) also find that there has been a decrease in variance in the quality of players (more good players relative to all players), making it easier for all teams to be competitive. So this would undercut the ability of large market teams to buy up all the talent. The only thing I really see observing a link between competitive balance and market share is an article by Depken (2002; Review of Industrial Organization), noting that there is an association in the AL but not the NL.

Anyway, I’ll shut up now. And realistically I’m not going to do any of my own research on this. But it still SEEMS to this fan that large market teams have it easier-and more so in baseball. :)