Team and Market Performance

by buckeye22fox on Mar 15, 2008 8:12 AM EDT Comment 14 comments

Grading the markets

I wanted to take a look at individual baseball markets and see how efficient they perform. I wanted to find a way to correlate Market Population, Attendance, and Wins as a way to grade team markets. Teams like the Yankees, Dodgers and Mets ranked lower because of the percentage of population that attend games. I felt the need to put more emphasis on the ratio of attendance to market population than on correlating wins and markets. So I created a win coefficient as a motivator to attend/not attend games. The one major flaw is that there are capacities for teams in markets that could sell 200,000 tickets if they were able to but cannot do so. So, if the Yankees were able to stuff 120,000 people per game, it would make their ratio of attendance and population more comparable to smaller markets. So in essence, the purpose is to rank the specific market's ability to put people in the ballpark based on population and wins. Basically I needed something to do while bored at work and conjured up this to occupy my time. I'm sure if anybody had time to waste like me that they could come up with a better formula. For the most part the information analyzes which small market teams are the most efficient.

I took into consideration Market Population, MC-Market Coefficient (Market population/MLB Market average population), Att/G-Home Attendance per game, AMA-Adjusted Market Attendance (Home Attendance per game * Market Coefficient), WC-Win Coefficient (Team Wins2 / League Avg Wins2) and T&MP-Team and Market Performance (Adjusted Market Attendance * Win Coefficient). Market Population, Wins, and Home Attendance per game were the statistics that I did not make up. All statistics were used from the 2007 season.

T&MP=(1/MC)(Att/G)(Wins^2/League Avg Wins^2)

T&MP Rankings

Here is the complete data table.

My creation of the Team and Market Performance (T&MP) ranked Milwaukee the best because they have 16% of average market population yet have the 13th highest attendance ranking and fans have more motivation to go to the games because they have a positive winning coefficient.

Our beloved Reds finished 9th on my list. If the Reds would win an optimistic 90 games this coming year and would average 30,000 in attendance, then they would move up to 3rd in T&MP rankings if everyone else performed the same as in 2007.

Feel free to criticize my conjured up statistics and rationale.

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Nice work

I did something somewhat similar a few years back. My goal was to try to understand fan interest, which I defined as the degree to which fans attend games above and beyond what you'd otherwise expect them to do based on things like team wins, stadium quality, MSA population size, etc. I used multiple linear regression:
http://jinaz-reds.blogspot.com/2006/03/quantifying-fan-interest-pt-3.html
The Marlins, White Sox, and Athletics came out as the three worst in my analysis. It used 1999-2005 data.

Anyway, just thought you might be interested in another take on this. -j

On Baseball and the Reds

by JinAZ on Mar 15, 2008 10:51 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

nice work

to the both of you. ive always wondered about this, and now youve done and gone scratched me right where i itched. seems like the reds could really be a standard-bearer if only they could put some wins on the board. i like that.

by Charlie Scrabbles on Mar 15, 2008 12:07 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

wins

At least in my model, wins are part of the calculation--each win resulted in an extra 13,000 fans in the current year, plus another 16,000 in the subsequent year. Overall, the Reds were roughly a middle-of-the-pack team in terms of fan interest.
-j

On Baseball and the Reds

by JinAZ on Mar 15, 2008 12:45 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

this is really cool

the one problem I see with it, though, is it seems a few teams (Yankees, Mets, White Sox) are penalized because they're in big cities and baseball stadiums only get so big. Maybe instead of using att/game, you could use (att/capacity)/game. just a thought.

Marty may have a shirt on, but Billy Beane just ripped his off and is squeezing his nipples. - Brendan's ukkah

by boobs on Mar 15, 2008 12:21 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

red sox

The only team in my model that seemed badly affected by sellout issues were the Red Sox, which came in as having below-average attendance despite selling out every game. The Yankees could arguably have an issue there as well, but their stadium has a huge capacity, so they came out looking pretty good. Not sure who else might be affected similarly--who else sells out almost every game?

The White Sox came out very poorly (as did the Athletics). They live in a huge metropolitan area (even though I divided their city populations in half because they share the market with another team), and had some success, yet they didn't draw very well at all.

Your idea about attendance/capacity is an interesting one. I might give that a go if I ever get back to updating my study, but I'd be interested in seeing how much impact buckeye22fox finds that has on his numbers... I also wanted to look at Forbes' estimated team income data as an alternative to attendance, though there are some issues with using those figures as well..
-j

On Baseball and the Reds

by JinAZ on Mar 15, 2008 12:56 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

With regards to that....

Could you normalize around ticket prices? Shouldn't supply and demand drive up the affordability of tickets in big markets?

I am under the impression that you can't BUY a ticket to a Red Sox game.

How about figuring in season ticket holders versus simply "attendance", such as "walk -up" on game day?

All in all, an interesting study.

"I guess I picked a bad day to stop sniffing glue!"- Lloyd Bridges

by Lonesome George on Mar 15, 2008 7:25 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

I thought about using capacity %

but I thought those numbers would be less useful because of the range of capacities. Some teams like Minnesota would be at a disadvantage because the capacity is large. Like JinAZ said the only real team affected is BOS, maybe arguments can be made for CHC, SFG, STL and DET (only teams over 93% capacity). I thought that overall attendance would be a better indicator.

by buckeye22fox on Mar 15, 2008 7:53 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

my problem

with the new york-chicago-LA teams is that the MC (market coefficient) would be wildly inflated for those teams (New York has 25X [2,500 percent] the population of Cincinnati, but Yankee Stadium has only about 30 percent more capacity than GABP.) But looking at your formula, I don't actually see MC figured in anywhere, so...

Marty may have a shirt on, but Billy Beane just ripped his off and is squeezing his nipples. - Brendan's ukkah

by boobs on Mar 15, 2008 10:35 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Sorry

I fixed the formula as the market coefficient was factored in the T&MP formula. I typed WC when I should have typed in MC. The WC is the wins squared over league average wins squared. I briefly touched upon the fact that capacities kind of screw the bigger markets as they could pack in more people for bigger games.

by buckeye22fox on Mar 15, 2008 11:08 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Along the same lines

the larger metropolitan areas may be punished because some of its fans have a much longer drive to the stadium due to distance and traffic. For a Yankees fan living in central NJ, it could easily take an hour to reach the Stadium.

by ken on Mar 16, 2008 11:59 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs