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• Wrigley Rooftop Directory
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MLB Road Trip: Quantifying the visiting fanMonday, June 13, 2005As you know, the Red Sox and their legions of fans showed up at Wrigley Field this weekend. Like Cubs fans, Red Sox fans are known for traveling with their team to support their favorite players in hostile territory. Although I wasn't in attendance at any of the games, quotes from bloggers who attended were pretty similar to this one:
All this got me thinking about a method to quantitatively estimate the number of visiting fans at a ballgame. What I have come up with, I will call Marginal Road Fans. The method to find the number of Marginal Road Fans a visiting team brings with them is a rough estimate, but it starts by summing up the announced attendance for a road series against a particular 'home opponent', counting the number of games played, and determining the average attendance at that series. For an illustration, I'll use the Cubs (visiting team) road series against the Diamondbacks (home opponent).
After finding the attendance for the road series, and any other visits your ball club made to the home opponent in question, you have to find out what the total attendance for the home opponent has been this year, and how many games they have played at home.
You then subtract the total attendance for the road series from the home opponent's total attendance and divide by the number of home dates minus the number of games the visiting team has played there. This will give you the average attendance at the home opponents stadium in games where your team was not playing.
Finally, you subtract the series average from the modified average to find the differential in the number of fans attending the series versus what would have otherwise been expected. Then, multiply the differential by the number of games in the series to find the total Marginal Road Fans.
You can then interpret this to mean that when the Cubs played the Diamondbacks in April, 27,249 more fans came to watch the series than would have come if an 'average' (average is a composite of all the Diamondback's other home opponents) team had been playing. Below are my results for both the Cubs and the Red Sox. Cubs Road Attendance:
Red Sox Road Attendance
As you can see, the Red Sox' Marginal Road Fans are nearly twice that of the Cubs. On an average road game, the Red Sox have played in front of 38,981, which is 10,994 fans more than would be expected if a league average team had come to play. (Similar in some respects to VORP). The Cubs on the other hand have played in front of 36,084 fans during their average road game, but that is 'only' 5,556 more fans than would have been expected. Weaknesses of the Marginal Road Fans MethodThis method of determining the number of fans a road team brings with them is flawed in many ways. Two of the most obvious limitations are that the method does not account for the day of the week on which the series is played, and it does not take into account stadium capacity restraints. Day of the Week: For most baseball teams, there is a significant difference in the number of fans which attend during the week, and those that attend on the weekends. Therefore, if a series is played during the middle of the week, when home attendance is down by 5,000, then the road team would have to have 5,000 marginal road fans before actually registering any in our count. However, this deficiency can be dismissed if road games were evenly distributed among the days of the week, and all home teams had the same difference between weekend and weekday fans. Of course though, this isn't the case. But, the alternative of trying to use the day of the week extends already tedious calculations into a nightmare, and virtually ensures small sample sizes that distort the method. Capacity Limitations: The capacity of a stadium tends to distort the Marginal Road Fans attendance method. When the attendance capacity is reached, rather than increasing the number of tickets sold, ticket prices increase. A perfect example of this is the recently concluded Cubs vs. Red Sox series. When Red Sox nation descended upon Wrigley (which has been filled to 97.6% capacity this year), the number in attendance didn't increase so much as the Red Sox fans paid increased prices to purchase seats from Cubs fans.
Watching the games on TV, it was pretty obvious that there were plenty more than 1,542 more Red Sox fans than a typical visiting team would bring over a three game series. So, the common sense test is strained quite a bit... but I do believe that the Marginal Road Fans method is a great start to quantifying the number of road fans. So, thats my theory, warts and all. I'd love to hear any comments and ideas on a better way to quantify road attendance. Posted by Byron at June 13, 2005 6:09 PM
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I don't know if this is a weakness or not, but...
Yes, this is a great idea, but not all of these people are Red Sox fans. A great number come out to see their team to play the Red Sox. It doesn't mean tht they're Red Sox fans. Are you more excited (read: want to go to a game more) when the Cardinals are in town or the Rockies?
Methinks dividing everything in half would give an accurate show as to how many are in fact, Red Sox fans.
Good point Evan, maybe I should think about redefining exactly what the marginal fan is...
A possible solution to your caveats...
A day-of-the-week index. If you can get the data ito an excel format, you could get each day's attendence versus the average daily attendence. This would be a multiplicative factor that goes into the equation. However, the calculation to get these indexes may be, as you said, tedious. At that point the solution, in my experience, is always: "hire a grad student."
There's also the matter that I don't think much of the marginal fan attendance is actually fans travelling with the team, but fans of the away team showing who live in the area showing up for the game. For example, we had a bunch of people from Cleveland at my old office, and they would always show up at Anaheim Stadium when the Indians were in town.
Also... I know this is partially factored into the averages, but it matters when these games are played as well... for example the D-Backs played the Cubs in their home opener, of course those games are going to have a higher attendance.
Also, if a team goes into Cincinnati and Cleveland and Detroit and Pittsburgh in April or early May, nobody is going to those games, maybe that makes the marginal fans higher since there's a lower total of overall fans and more tickets available for marginal fans to buy. I just don't see anybody traveling to those cities to sit in potentially cold weather.
Also, it's easy to notice the bump in the Red Sox road attendance against Tampa Bay, it's also easy to explain (the Rangers are another story). It's not because the Red Sox fans are traveling, it's because they never left. I think you'll notice a similar trend with any team that plays Florida, the Devil Rays and the D'backs... if they're a Grapefruit League team they'll see a bump in the former... a Cactus League team will see a bump in the latter. Especially in Florida, you're a fan of whatever team plays closest to you, whether that's Boston, the Yankees or the Cardinals...
Relocated franchises will see a similar result, for example when the Dodgers or Giants visit New York.
Another thing that could give some answers to the capacity limitations could be looking at the percentage of tickets available to marginal fans. Take the non-Cubs average and subtract it from the overall capacity. That would be the number of tickets available to Cubs fans to buy. For the Crosstown classic, we could look at what percentage of available tickets did the White Sox buy and what percentage of tickets did Cubs fans buy for the games in two weeks at Comiskey.
That might give more insight to the Cubs' low numbers against the Dodgers, for example... How many marginal tickets did they leave in comparison to other teams and what percentage of the marginal tickets available did they buy compared to other teams?
A column for sellouts might be helpful to see, like Evan said, what road opponents home team fans want to come out and see their teams play and what road opponent's traveling team went all out and sold out the game.
Jason... here's the new Cubdom tagline.
Byron Clarke.... Grad Student of the CBA.
Byron... I could be wrong... but I think you're missing a break somewhere on your right side between Archive Index and about the Cubdom.
Byron -
To avoid sample size issues for a day-of-the-week index, I would think that looking at all the ballparks for each day would be the best bet. For Monday, sum up the total attendence, same for tuesdays, etc. And then that can be used against the baseline of average attendence.
As far as the ballpark capacity, I don't know what you do what that. Not much, I'm guessing.
and btw, very nice work. I look forward to version 2.0
By the end of the season I would think most of these factors would balance out. Another twist on the "when" angle is that a team that gets hot will draw more than teams that are out of it. If we went back to Arizona now then the figures could dramatically increase due to the dramatic improvement of the D'Backs. One could check this by comparing avg attendance per month as the season progresses. Teams traveling to Arizona in September will do well in attenance if the D'Backs are still vying for the playoffs.