Tamp Em Up Solid
Posted by John Vrooman on Thursday, May 24, 2018 in Major League Baseball.
Interview with Tampa Bay Times.
If the Rays new ballpark has about 600,000 more fans within a 15 mile radius, what might that do to their average attendance?
Total MLB attendance remains a variable function of market size, venue capacity and team quality, but according to this simple location theory metric, an increase in the 30 minute ballpark radius population of 600K would increase the ratio of Rays weekday to weekend attendance from a current MLB low 67 percent (Padres and Indians) to about 75 percent (Reds, Royals and Pirates).
The league average weekday/weekend ratio is about 83.3 percent, and the top clubs are the Giants, Red Sox and mid-market Cardinals with little or no weekday drop-off.
Location theory attendance graphs.
I worked up your hypothetical example of the effect of 600,000 more fans within the 30 minute driving radius. In the table below average home is the actual average attendance at the Trop.
In the attached study for 2014, weekday attendance was 67 percent of weekend attendance and that is reflected in the estimates for the rest of the weekend and weekday attendance figures.
“Weekend” attendance is simply 120 percent of actual home and “weekend” is 80 percent of actual home attendance. (This assumes the season is evenly split between weekday and weekend dates). Home* and Weekday* (75 percent of weekend) are corresponding attendance estimates within 30 minute radius.
This analysis only considers the location of the stadium within Tampa St. Pete. A new stadium would of course increase all attendance across the board during a three to four year honeymoon period for new venues.
The estimates from the 2014 study project that 600,000 more fans within 30 minutes would increase the weekday/weekend ratio to 75 percent. (Similar to the Pirates, Royals and Reds).
This would generally increase the weekday average attendance by about 2,000 fans and overall attendance by 1,000 fans for any given team quality. It is easy to see that however, that the best way to increase average overall attendance is to improve the season performance of the Rays between the lines. Overall attendance is strongly correlated to the general decline in team quality over the last 10 seasons.
Compare the size of the overall dive in performance based attendance to the relative magnitude of the upward weekday bump.
I am working on a story about the location of the proposed new Rays ballpark. The focus is on whether it has enough people within a 30-minute drive time.
Can you talk about how important that metric is? Why does it matter? How does it factor into weekday attendance?
Are there any places that record this? Are there any venues that buck this metric?
This is probably what you are looking for with an application to Tampa/St. Pete. Looks like the originator of the idea is Maury Brown a baseball business writer now with Forbes.
The Rays have the lowest 2000 population within the 30-minute radius (670K) and the greatest differential between weekday and weekend game attendance at about 50 percent. At the other end of the spectrum are the SF Giants with no attendance difference within the week (all games are sold out), and the team that adversely bucks the trend is the Southside Chicago White Sox. Ironically both of these clubs threatened and relocations in the early 1990s to St. Pete that ultimately resulted in the awarding of the Devil Rays expansion franchise to Tampa St. Pete.
The St. Louis Cardinals are predictably the team that positively bucks the trend with less than 2 percent variance in weekly attendance and a 30-minute population of about 1.6 million.
The interesting aspect in this story is that the difference between the Tampa Lightning attendance in 2015 was only about 5 percent playing in downtown Tampa at the Amalie Arena (Tampa Bay Times Forum). The implication is that a Tampa-centric location would reduce the variance and attendance risk for the Tampa Rays.
Here’s a cool location theory map of the Atlanta Braves ticket buyers for 2012 that was used in the economic justification of their recent premature relocation to Sun Trust Park in suburban Cobb County.
https://www.ajc.com/news/sports/braves-ticket-buyers/
According to this “gravity model” the optimum location of the new venue is the economically weighted center of gravity for the ticket base. “Build it and they will come” the shortest average geometrical distance.
The problem for this and any other economic location theory is that it assumes a frictionless political map. In the abstract world the economic solution rules but in the real world inside politics usually “trumps” economics.
The final location for Sun Trust Park had as much or more to do with the inside politics of Cobb County Commission than the gravitational center of the Braves fan base. Satellite suburban governments are politically advantageous for political stadium extortion relocation games because they are easier to manipulate.
Cobb County taxpayers are paying about $400 million of a $1.1 billion project including the $670 million ballpark and the surrounding $400 million mixed-use development, Battery Atlanta.
Officials in Tampa are contemplating a plan to get private development to pay for the brunt of the rays ballpark by giving developers the rights to surrounding development like bars, restaurants, hotel, etc.
Would that ever add up? It seems a stretch to me
Sounds like the failed proposal made by the Oakland Athletics to relocate to Fremont in 2006 toward the South Bay. The Fremont ball park had a limited minor league capacity of 35K, but the deal ultimately fell through. The Athletics continued quest for a stadium in San Jose has more recently run into the legal constraints of the territorial limits of the SF Giants in the South Bay.
Ball parks are generally bad anchors for economic development and the external spinoff effects are usually exaggerated zero-sum ventures at best. A smaller intimate ball park with strong linkages to the larger economic grid could possibly work on a small scale, but the benefits would be prioritized toward the developers themselves. The net external spinoffs are probably overestimated for either a public or private venture.
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