I've been thinking about the idea of attendance and its effect on the decisions regarding the re-build and have found some interesting things:
1. Attendance has been falling for several years. 2.4M in 2012, 2.55M in 2013, 2.35M in 2014, 2M in 2015.
2. In 2015 the Braves at 2M were 24th in baseball. In 2014 they were 18th. But, the bottom 10 are all fairly close to one another and have been. In 2015, third worst attendance in baseball was Miami with 1.75M. Cleveland at 1.39M and Tampa at 1.25M were the real outliers.
3. Obviously pure numbers don't tell the whole story as the value of the seats sold and other things such as concessions bought, parking paid for, etc have an effect on the total dollar value.
4. Interleague and interdivision play has been a real savior for attendance for many franchises. I've often wondered how many Cubs fans or Yankee fans are in the park when they come to Atlanta. The answer appears to be a lot. In 2015 in April 10-12, the Mets came to town and the Braves had crowds of 46k, 36k and 28k. That was a weekend series that looks good (but remember no one had any idea the Mets would be good). But, the Braves backstopped that with a mid week series against Miami where they drew 13k, 15k and 18k then later that same month had the Nats in drawing 16k, 14k and 12k. I think it clear that timing has an effect on attendance. A nice weekend day in the spring is a great time to go see the Braves, no matter who is playing for them or who they are playing against. Mid week on a school night, not so much.
When the Yankees came to town Aug 28-30, AFTER the Braves had essentially thrown in the towel, the Braves drew 33K, 35K and 49K. The Cubs came to town July 17-19, again pretty much as the Braves were sinking to the bottom, and drew 31K, 42K and 45K.
5. So, if you get a visit from teams who travel well and have fans everywhere like the Yankees, Red Sox or Cubs then you have hit the schedule gold mine since you have a good chance of filling your stadium no matter what. Unfortunately, the opposite holds true if you are unlucky enough to have a bad opponent draw. Like the Braves have for 2016. In 2016 the Braves oppose the AL Central for interleague opponents and they get the teams that aren't likely to travel well like Cleveland, Minnesota and Detroit. That tells me that attendance was going to be down no matter what in 2016, but it will all be blamed on the rebuild. (The Braves do get Boston for 2 games and the Cubs for 3.)
6. No matter what, it is unlikely that the Braves drop from 2M to below 1.2M in one year in attendance. If they had the Yankees and Red Sox and Cubs at home for weekend series, they could probably run a team of blind midgets out there and still draw 2M fans. But, since they don't have those teams coming then they will probably be in the 1.5M range.
7. If you take 2.5M as the upper limit and 1.5M as a lower limit, then you can fairly easily gain an idea about the impact of attendance for the Braves. Lets say the average ticket price for those seats not being filled is $20 then that's a loss of $20M in revenue, if the value is $30 then $30M, etc. But, the Braves were at 2M last year and could fall as low as 1.5M this year, so you half the revenue lost from the example above. 2017 is a reset anyway because you are moving into a new park and would get a novelty bump even if you ran the blind midgets back out there.
All this tells me that concerns over attendance are trivial regarding the rebuild and its effect on 2016. Concerns over attendance for 2017 and beyond hinge directly on the effectiveness of the rebuild.
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Originally Posted by dak
