What's happening here at the ballpark in Toronto and what is the Blue Jay management brain-trust doing about it?
The Blue Jays drew over four million fans in one season back in the 1990s and were the first team ever to do so. What has happened since is a continuous and at times precipitous decline from this remarkable achievement.
Checking Baseball-Reference.com today shows a Jays club that has drawn just over 200 000 fans thus far this season, ranking second last of fourteen teams in the A.L., just a few thousand fans better than Cleveland. Sad.
Here is what a crowd of 10 721 looks like; ugh. The view of the Rogers Centre crowd from the pressbox on April 29, 2010. Crowds of ten to fifteen thousand are now the norm where once 30 to 40 thousand once sat (and spent!).
Photo Copyright 2010 www.jamesireland.ca
I entreat baseball fans to come out and watch the game at the ballpark. Do not take the Jays for granted. The Expos / Expositos / Nationals story should remind us that MLB is quite sensitive to teams not based in the U.S. that don't seam to have big local fan support.
A recent study I read (sorry, can't recall where just now) indicates more and more fans, Blue Jay fans in particular, are watching the games on Rogers Sportsnet (and other RSNs in other markets) and MLB.com. This might be true. But the image on the screen of huge areas of empty seats at the Rogers Centre does not contribute to exciting TV viewing, nor does it inspire one to come out to a game some time in the future. Cheering a team at an empty park is not very exciting and does not inspire one to come back again. A large and involved crowd is part of what makes seeing a game at the park such a special event, and worth the time, and the price of the tickets, food, drink, etc.
So please folks, come on out to the ballpark. We in Toronto have what many U.S. markets smaller than ours don't (but would very much like to have, and would support devotedly); a Major League Baseball franchise that plays against other Major League teams from both the American and National Leagues right here in our city all summer long. Which means we here in Toronto and the surrounding area (a market that amounts to about four million people) get to see the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox many times each year, and teams from the other A.L. Divisions and their star players a few times per year. And with Interleague play we get a good sampling of the talent and tradition of the National League as well. So this season we get to enjoy games featuring Albert Pujols and the St. Louis Cardinals, and National League Cy Young Award winner Tim Lincecum and the San Francisco Giants. But for the G20 Summit we would also have had a series with the Philadelphia Phillies with Roy Halladay (a future Hall of Famer, now that he's in Philly, who Toronto fans and Jays management both took for granted I feel; a guy who stayed focused and excelled here in spite of small crowds and a constant lack of offensive support for all of his years in Toronto; his record and notoriety would have been considerably improved by playing elsewhere earlier in his career) and Chase Utley and Ryan Howard.
Now for Jays management what is there to do?
A few years ago the very smart people at Baseball Prospectus published a book called Baseball Between the Numbers, which contained two excellent articles by Neil Demause "Do High Salaries Lead to High Ticket Prices" ('No', BTW) and "Are New Stadiums A Good Deal" ('Yes', if you're an MLB team that isn't paying much/anything for the stadium, and 'No' if you're a taxpayer in a constituency that is paying for one with their tax dollars) that showed, among other things, that revenue for MLB teams spiked and then began their steady increase over the last 20 years now as a result of the opening of SkyDome (now Rogers Centre), the first baseball "mallpark" where architecture and design and fan comfort and experience and opportunities to spend on nice things in nice places were at the forefront of the concerns when the park was designed.
This trend that began around 1990 (SkyDome opened June 5, 1989 and thousands came over several seasons just to see the place) and has continued with the new retro-feel parks and modernization of old stalwarts like Fenway and Wrigley. More comfort and high-end ammenities equals more money spent by fans.
Rogers Centre is unfortunately showing it's age, and it is no longer the kind of park people prefer to watch baseball in; as innovative as it was with respect to concessions and luxury ammenities, the seating and playing area are still of the out of date 1970s cookie-cutter concrete donut type like Three-Rivers and Veterans and Busch and Riverfront that went out of style just as SkyDome was being designed. The fact that it has a retractable roof was innovative at the time, but no longer; most markets with unfriendly weather now have this feature, which while good for getting the games played at a comfortable temperature aren't always much to look at inside. And SkyDome's roof owes as much or more to the Astrodome and Kingdome as it does to Miller Park's cathedral like feel and Minute Maid and Safeco Parks' efforts to minimize the visual and experiential impact the roof has on fans. The Rogers Centre is all looming awkward steel that makes no effort to hide, even when the roof is open.
While it is probably not reasonable from a financial or weather viewpoint (although the Mariners have already built two stadiums in the same time) to expect a new outdoor retro-grass-and-dirt park in Toronto (Although, it should be noted, the architect of SkyDome, Scottish-Canadian architect Rod Robbie, has designed facilities with retractable grass fields that slide out under adjacent roads and parking lots, etc. In fact in one early iteration of the SkyDome concept he included plans for such a retractable playing surface. Alas, it was unproven at the time and didn't happen.) it is certainly possible to renovate the place, perhaps adding more character to the outfield dimensions, fence shape and heights, the outfield seating areas, and doing a bit more architecturally, (particularly to the field level seating, facings of the levels, and to make the roof's inner structure more visually appealing somehow) to give the fan more of a feel that they are seeing and experiencing something special, not an uninspired and uninspiring team playing in a huge almost empty warehouse, which is what the Rogers Centre is beginning to feel like, especially when the crowd is small and the roof is closed.
In the same book, B-P writer Nate Silver showed in his article "Is Alex Rodriguez Overpaid?" that attendance was statistically related most strongly to "Stadium Quality". I've covered that above. Rogers Centre needs a facelift.
After this such factors as market size and affluence (we're plenty big here as our ~ 4M 1990s attendance figures showed; don't believe anyone who tells you differently, whining about how we're a small market team.), "honeymoon effect" (tendency of fans to fall in love with a new park ... which a facelift would help achieve); part of the problem with the Jays are people are bored with the place and the experience; we want something new after fifteen plus years of the same-old same-old. Management again, see above.
The next most important factors influencing attendance are intuitive and have to do with winning ballgames. Fans will alter their behaviour on the short term in response to a team's winning or losing games in this season. And I ask the Jays management and players to promise the fans that this is the first priority for the organization for every individual game; try to win it with the tools at hand. Every other concern should be secondary to this covenant to the fans. Promises should not be made to players about playing time (viz. Cito's comments about the Jays relationship to struggling second rate first baseman Lyle Overbay) since these promises can in principle come in conflict with the need to win today.
The other factor relating to team performance that effects attendance is less intuitive, but still makes sense; playoff appearances in the previous ten seasons. This indicates that fans respond positively to a team this has a tradition of success, even if they aren't winning today, or even this season. The Jays had built this kind of winning tradition in the mid-1980s to 1993 with multiple pennants and two world series wins. And the Jays organization did it then in the same division as the spend-thrift Yankees and Red Sox as well as other teams with a long history. Management did it then with a committment to winning and by creative and innovative team-building; something that has been absent from the Jays front office for some time. It is easy to get lost in day-to-day details and forget that long term, perennial success requires a committment every day AND an overall strategy that aims to develop players who are ready to win in the future, and only supplementing this strategy with veteran free-agents when necessary or long-term contract "franchise players".
In this day and age a team must act with great circumspection when signing very expensive "franchise players" (Halladay-good choice, but now gone: Wells-expensive, very expensive mistake made by an over-excited J.P.: Rios-very expensive big mistake who the Jays are paying to have play for someone else: B.J. Ryan-horrendous error to pay that kind of money to ANY relief pitcher, J.P. also now gone via release, but still owed money!).
The Jays had this tradition once before and can have it again. The current state of Blue Jay attendance figures have as much to do with the loss of interest and loss of hope among fans that comes with a tradition of losing, a tradition of not making the play-offs and being out of contenion year after year by the time of the All-Star break as they do with how the team did today or yesterday.
Hey Alex! Take the Blue Jays organization in hand, apply a long term vision that aims to make teams that win 91 or more games every second or third season, which gives a team a 70 % chance of making the play-offs. Avoid seasons in the 75-85 win zone (where the Jays have LIVED for the last 15 seasons) where a team has a less than 10% chance of making the playoffs; they cost too much for little payback in fan satisfaction. Better to jettison payroll, save the money for the future, and win 75 games this year with some low cost rookies; the payroll to win games 75 to 85 costs too much and the fans still don't see the Jays in the playoffs. After a very short time no one cares if the Jays have a few "name" veteran free agent is adding a couple of wins each above average if the team is out of contention in July.
You are a young guy Alex, who I believe knows and understands modern stats and how to use them. While it's important to win today (with the tools you've got), it's crucial to make a committment to winning enough games to make the playoffs often enough to keep the fans involved. The Blue Jays have neglected this for almost twenty years, Toronto fans have lost hope, and interest in a mediocre team that seems designed to fail to make the playoffs year after year.
Give us hope (and a nicer place to come out and cheer), and the fans will come again and in numbers not seen in Toronto in over a decade and a half.
James Ireland
www.jamesireland.ca
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Location:Fleet St,Toronto,Canada
