Attendance and Hitting

http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/OAK/1996.shtml

861 runs scored; 1.1 mil in attendance (last in AL)

947 runs scored; 1.6 mil (11th in the AL)

in other words, in what was by far the best offensive year ever in oakland attendance was still pretty bad.

I hear had lots of offense, but that didn’t translate at the gate?

The Gnats across the bay have a lousy offense?

winning doesn’t always increase attendance. 1974 we won the WS and were 11th of 12 in AL.

major and sustained drop-off aftern 1975 (the sell-off?)

jump in 81 and 82 (billy ball)

huge jump in 89-92 (bash bros at their best)

major and sustained drop from 93 to 2001. (what happened then? when was mount davis put up?)

substantial jump in 2001 through 2005. (why not 2000?)

really crappy since 2005. why so bad in 2006? the tarp?

and there is a moderate correlation (r=.44; p<.01) between runs and attendance. it’s basically the same (r=.45) for wins and attendance. of course, this does nothing to reveal if offense leads to attendance or vice versa, but whatever. i had some free time and i effectively killed it.

although i was thinking “personality” more than star power. since the desmantling of the big 3 this team has had no personality. it has had rental stars (e.g. holliday), but there is little hope these days of getting attached to charismatic and productive players that will be around for a while.

It’s not the offense or even another aspect of the game like pitching or defense — as extremely good and bad as those have gotten over the years, that ain’t it. There’s enough data to show that no one comes, for the most part and certainly after the Mt. Davis monstrosity went up, if we score 900+ runs or 600+. If we lead the galaxy in ERA+ it is just as significant: nil, i.e. not at all. Obviously people did come 1989-92 but that was when the A’s ruled the sports world and the Giants were struggling to stay in SF and playing in a venue that makes the Coliseum look like Citizen’s Bank Park. People didn’t come to see the Moneyball years of 2000-2006 at the same clip as they did with the winning squads of 1989-92 once the Giants had built their place and the worm had turned towards the sickening status we see today, with the Giants ruling the Bay Area market and the A’s barely with a pulse of relevance even in the face of major motion pictures and Brad Pitt and all that.

We are so into this thing that we tend to project our intensity of fandom onto prospective customers that haven’t a clue or an interest about baseball specifically or even about sports in general. We want to make it about some metrically measurable aspect related to performance, cuz that’s what drives a lot of our thoughts and discourse about the A’s whether it’s 1973, 1988, 2001, 2011 or 3026. We are sort of the original fans that look for statistically measured yardsticks by which we can determine — in this case — the cause of the low-attendance effect. I feel we are sort of barking up the wrong tree and that the reality is much more primal and basic.

OK, all these people you see at the Giants game? They aren’t sabermetricians. They aren’t Fantasy Baseball types…. most not only don’t care about your Fantasy team, they probably wouldn’t even know what that is. They aren’t even interested or cognizant of the minutiae, not like we are. They are after an entertainment experience…as Joseph Campbell termed it in The Power of Myth, they are after an “experience of being alive.” They come to AT&T Park like it’s a gallery art opening, a Day on the Green, a concert in the park, a way to have fun and just be entertained whatever night of the week… an extension of the atmosphere and the ambiance and the cultural options they live in a legendary city like SF to partake of. The next morning when they wake up, they just remember the fun they had with their friends and the garlic fries and the Bay view and if the Giants lost, these folks in all likelihood do not even remember the score or how it got there over the course of a baseball game they saw. And they are happy as proverbial clams feeling that way.

When we play a game, there may be 5,000 people there including the damn vendors, but many if not most in the place are hip to the trip and down to obsess over the game and what’s going on in it. Although the Giants (and all teams) do have fans ostensibly similar to us, most people you see out there at Halloween House (that is to say, those 30,000 or so per game they outdraw us by) would not know OPS from the Special Ops the NSA runs to destabilize unfriendly and noncompliant foreign regimes. Us? We wake up WEEKS (hint: not Rickie) after a particular game still well aware of exactly what pitch went right or wrong in what count and to what hitter that caused the game’s outcome and trajectory to take the course it did. What you see at the Coliseum on any given night (when there isn’t a swaggly giveaway or a Yankees/Red Sox vs. Oakland affair to draw the bobblehead- and success-obsessed into the venue) is a fanbase stripped back to its essence, where only the hardcores remain.

When you examine the last 43 years, you ask yourself “Why?” Why has a World Series winning team (1974) been dead last in attendance, how is that possible? How has this franchise — one of most successful and innovative in its sport and having won multiple WS titles with some of the best players ever to put on a uniform — never been able to be consistently above 2,000,000, and has failed in 4-decades-and-change to ever reach the three million mark?

If the same lack of attendance has taken place — as it has, over multiple regimes and many different eras both of excellence and futility —you have to start to look at what the constants are in the situation, and our main and only constant besides the two-team market and the white shoes has been the concrete concentration camp we call the (O.No) Coliseum. If you look at the pattern, the wall we keep hitting seems to be the unfriendliness of the venue towards an experience of being alive, in the sense of what people in the modern day expect from an entertainment experience at the baseline to drop their dollars on it on a consistent basis.

Since Mt. Davis went up and especially since the Giants built their palace-straight-out-of-a-Tony-Bennett-ballad and the Coli’s upper deck was closed with the tarps, you have a venue that is simply not conducive towards the attraction of the casual, only-marginally-interested-in-baseball people you need to have a thriving product. Maybe back when you could see the hills this was better, but even back then more than 20,000 in the place meant ridiculous concession lines and no path of thoroughfare through those lines for people to stroll around the Coliseum venue to take in an entertainment-friendly atmosphere. So more than any transitory and shifting aspect of the product on the field — hitting, pitching, etc. — the millstone anchor around the Athletics’ franchise’s collective neck that’s dragged us to the bottom of the MLB ocean is the venue, its terminal inefficacy, its location — there’s nothing to do before/after a game in the East Oakland industrial wasteland that in no way resembles McCovey Cove and the newly-supercharged China Basin neighborhood AT&T Park catalyzed the revitalization for (and instead exposes people to a perception of poverty and unattractive degradation NOT conducive to drawing folks into an entertainment frame of mind) — everything about it screams “inadequate and insulting” to the casual fan and until we can escape there for a better place (the Diridon or Victory Court, either is fine with me at this point) things will not change no matter what or who we put on the field, I’m afraid.

OK, now that I have uplifted A’s nation with my words of unbridled, giggly optimism, it’s time for lunch.

And yeah I didnt go into pitching here, because honestly I thought this was long enough and this right here
RK Team
1 Philadelphia Phillies
2 Atlanta Braves
3 Oakland Athletics
4 San Francisco Giants
5 San Diego Padres

I will not question pitching when they are in 3rd place (granted I think it should be #1, but with injuries I understand) Plain and simple if I had to pick 3 pitchers off the team that are my top 3 right now its Gio, Cahill and Bailey (Braden is close up there for me but he’s on the DL)