Understanding Attendance: Tampa Bay Rays and the Trop 2008

I've noticed a lot of discussion recently about the "poor" attendance at Tampa Bay Rays games. ESPN as well as other national media and the local media continuously harp on the Rays low attendance and slap the great folks of Tampa Bay for not supporting their winning team. So, I thought it might make sense to do a little bit of analysis (don't expect the media to analyze anything) to put some context around the discussion. While it may not result in any good soundbites, I think it will help people understand that the attendance, relative to a number of factors, is not all that bad in Tampa Bay.

Here is the data I utililized for my analysis:

Local Population per Team
2008 YTD and Per Game Attendance (from ESPN.com)
2008 Payroll Figures
Age of Franchise in Current market

I ran a few simple calculations and came up with the following summary:

• Tampa Bay ranks #26 (of 30) in attendance per home game for 2008 with 21,304 per game.
• Tampa Bay also ranks as #26 (of 30) in total population
• Tampa Bay ranks #29 (of 30) in payroll for 2008 (approx. $44 million)
• Tampa Bay is the youngest franchise in all of MLB (tied with Arizona)

So, from the outset, it looks like the Rays attendance is roughly in line with the size of its market and is actually better than its rank for payroll and age (nothing too earth shattering here). But, that is not nearly satifying enough for me, so I dug a little deeper.

What about looking at the attendance relative to the size of the market? After all, it is logical that a place like New York, despite having two teams, will have more fans. For example, the New York market is approximately 21.2 million people. With two teams, that makes 10.6 million people per team (21.2 divided by 2 teams). Tampa Bay, on the other hand, is an area of only 2.4 million people (about 1/4 the number of potential fans relative to each New York team). So, I decided to look at all teams and calculate the percentage of the market population that attends a game each year. Here is the formula I used:

• % of Mkt Pop Attending = ((Avg. Attendance per Home Game / Total Pop per Team) * 81 Home Games)

This calculation helps to adjust for market size and yielded the following results:

• Tampa Bay ranks #12 for % of Mkt Pop that attends a home game

Other notable cities include Milwaukee at #1, San Francisco at #7, Chicago Cubs at #11, New York Yankees at #27 and Florida Marlins at #30. Tampa Bay is not looking too bad once you normalize for the size of its market.

But, that also got me thinking - isn't this about putting on a production (e.g. entertainment) for the fans and won't the end result be better if you spend more money for "better" players? Some might argue that the teams with more attendance spend more money, but I wouldn't let that deter my analysis. So, the next thing I looked at was a measure of payroll vs. attendance and here is what I found:

• Tampa Bay ranks #29 (of 30) in Payroll per Home Game Attendee

Thus, one might even argue that Tampa Bay management spends its money more efficiently than nearly every other team in MLB. The Rays spend $25.50 per attendee per home game on payroll vs. nearly $50 for the Yankees. So, since we rank #26 in attendance per home game (and #12 if you factor in market size), that means we are doing better than what one might expect based on the amount of money spent on our production.

Finally, I wanted to know if age matters. The Tampa Bay Rays are the youngest team in Major League Baseball and are still building their fan base (or so one might argue). So, I looked at the average home game attendance for the 10 oldest baseball franchises (ranked based on how long they've been in their current market) and the 10 youngest baseball franchises. The 10 oldest teams had an average age of 122 years and the 10 youngest were about 27 years old. Here is what I found:

• The 10 oldest teams averaged 32,800 per home game
• The 10 youngest teams averaged 26,600 per home game

That's about 19% less just based on the age of the franchise.

So, in summary, while we would all like to see the Tampa Bay Rays sell out all of their games, the attendance is not nearly as bad as the folks in the media might suggest. The Rays attendance is:

• Roughly in line with its market size
• Above average given the age ranking of the franchise
• Well above average when attendance is adjusted for market size
• Among the best in the league in efficiency (payroll per game per Attendee)
• Up 24% over 2007 and the highest its been since the inaugural season!

Go Rays!!!