The Nationals’ Unique Fanbase
Tom Verducci, in a recent article on Bryce Harper, mentions that the Nationals averaged only about 12,000 households viewing each home game last season.
It occurs to me that the Nationals may be the only team in the country where the “fan base” is more likely to go to a game than watch it on TV. After all, the Nationals to a certain extent positioned their new stadium as a prime location for D.C. power players to have business meetings and discuss the future of our Great Nation. Of course, the Nationals have not been putting a great product on the field of late, which will diminish any team’s fan base. But the Nationals’ current path, of increasing respectability borne on the back of several marquee names (Strausberg, Zimmerman, Zimmermann, and now Harper), is precisely the sort of attention-grabbing roster construction that would make an afternoon ballpark business meeting trendy. Perhaps more than any other city, the Nationals have access to a unique demographic, one with money to spend but questionable rooting interest in the team.
To investigate this, I found stadium attendance and TV ratings from the 2009 season. The bigger the ratio of game attendance to TV households, the larger the percentage of assumed fan base attends games:
The Nationals were the only team who averaged more fans in the seats than households tuning into the game (the shocking part of this is that their TV ratings were up 67% over 2008). The Yankees and the Red Sox, as expected, were at the bottom. The Marlins and Rays both had two different cable networks (FS Florida and SunSports) showing their games, which increased their household viewing numbers. The Braves’ large number is due to their TBS days and two cable networks (FS South and SportSouth). The source I used did not have television numbers for the Blue Jays.
There are a couple of factors likely working against the Nationals here. One is that they are a recently-transplanted franchise which has not had the opportunity to build deep roots in its new city. The team that arrived in Washington in 2005, and the stadium in which they first played, did them no favors. Nevertheless, no other team comes even close to the Nationals’ ratio.
I’m no economics major, but these numbers seem to suggest that certain teams are pricing their tickets appropriately. The Athletics and the Nationals’ average 2009 ticket prices, $24.31 and $30.63 respectively, resulted in the highest ratios of game attendance versus TV audience. In those cities, it seems, ticket prices are encouraging fans to watch games in person.
There is another interesting aspect to this data. Much has been written recently about how a new stadium no longer “saves” a team. Baltimore and Cleveland’s new stadiums in the 1990s ushered in many years of big crowds and increased revenue. Writers have pointed to Pittsburgh and indeed Washington as examples of how the novelty of a new stadium is wearing off faster these days.
Yet look at Baltimore and Cleveland. They rank 4th and 9th respectively in ratio of game attendance to television audience. Their beautiful ballparks are still saving them from an even more precipitous decline in fan base interest.
Sources:
tv numbers: http://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/article/63798
attendance numbers: http://espn.go.com/mlb/attendance/_/year/2009
A version of this article first appeared on my blog.
Very interesting findings, nmirra. Frankly, I’m shocked to see the Rays and Cubs netting such similar ratings.
Good stuff…. but, if you look at 2010 TV numbers, the Nats TV audience has shot way way up from 2009.
I guess it just takes time, and some winning to get the fans to watch on TV.
Am I blind or are the Jays omitted from that list? Wonder where they fit in.
Definitely an interesting list. However, I think most of this could be chalked up to the fact that there’s a limited number of seats sold by the team, but larger markets have so many more people. Your list is essentially ordered from the smallest to the largest markets (with the exception of the Angels, who have a unique fanbase for other reasons).
I wonder how much MASN and the blackout area affect this? The channel still isn’t carried by somecable carriers that are in the blackout area (Time Warner Cable in the Raleigh area for example) so for many households, they actually can’t watch the game without changing to satellite. I’ve always thought this was doing the Nationals a lot of harm. It might be helping negotiations between the network and TWC, but their missing out on the chance to develop lifelong fans in a region where children have no obvious home team. If I was an 8 year old kid who watched that Strasburg game last night, I would’ve been a Stras-fan for life.
I am pretty sure the Blue Jays are very close to the bottom of the list.
In 2009 attendance was 23,162 with about 300,000 viewers on the network that showed the bulk of their games (and owns the team) http://www.thestar.com/sports/article/629594
I don’t know how viewers compares to TV households but at 2 viewers/TV household the Jay’s ratio is 0.15.
The Jay’s maybe a special case because their games are carried nationally in Canada (pop~33 mil) with a large portion of the potential TV audience a long way from Toronto (along with a relatively poor ballpark experience).
Millsy – I think you’re generally right, but it isn’t that easily ordered. San Diego has 1.3 million people and 3 million in the metro area. The D.C. metro area has 5.4 million. I’m not familiar enough with the byzantine rules of cable TV networks to know the specifics of coverage in these areas. But going strictly off population, you’d expect the White Sox (for example) to catch a wider audience than the Mariners.
Fair enough, though the White Sox have an in-city competitor, while the Mariners have Washington and Oregon. But I have trouble with this statement as well:
“…but these numbers seem to suggest that certain teams are pricing their tickets appropriately.”
This pushes the idea that attendance maximization is congruent with profit maximization, which isn’t likely the case. You could charge $1 for every seat in the house, which would certainly encourage people to watch in person…but that wouldn’t necessarily be good for the team.
Millsy: The Chicago metro area (9.9 million) has almost as many residents as Washington and Oregon combined (10.4 million). Which I was pretty surprised to learn when I looked it up.
You’re right about that line about ticket prices. Profit maximization is much more complicated than simply getting people into the seats. I just find it interesting that in Oakland and Washington D.C., in relation to other cities, those who are interested in Athletics and Nationals baseball are more inclined to see a game in person than watch it on television. I’m sure marketing gurus in those two franchises could probably give us more information about this trend than we’d ever care to know.
nmirra,
Wow, so that’s why it takes so damn long to get in the city. Certainly not trying to be difficult. The whole interaction between television and showing up to the game is an interesting one, and I, too, would love to get my hands on some of that marketing data.
I’m not sure what the current deal is in Washington with the local broadcasting. I know that Angelos originally had control over some of the televising Nationals games in order to get him to be okay with moving the team there, but I thought it was only for a limited amount of time. I’m curious if this helps (in terms of attendance) and/or hurts (in terms of revenue and popularity) the Nationals.
Another thing to think about is that DC has a very transient population. A lot of residents are young and tied to the Federal Government occupationally, so they tend to move around a lot (and they bring their team allegiance with them). Also, Baltimore is only an hour away, and most baseball fans follow/followed the Orioles prior to the Nats moving.
Do you know how the average attendance number is calculated? Is it tickets sold or actual people showing up on game day? I’ve been to a few Nats games and 22,000 seems high to me. I bet the number is skewed upward by corporate ticket sales, although the Nats do have an excellent program in which people can show up on game day and purchase $5 bleacher seats.
Derek’s point is dead on. Fairfax County, Virginia has over a million people. Yet only 20 percent of its adult population grew up in Northern Virginia. Having grown up in the area I can tell you that many of my peers are attached to other teams because that’s who their father or other families members root for. There are a lot of transplants from Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York and Boston. Go to any Nats games and you’ll be shocked by the number of people in the gear of other teams not on the field that day, Red Sox specifically. None the less, the city has a thriving young population, made up of people semi-interested in sports that will jump on any bandwagon. Look at the following the city got for the Caps. The team went from shy of 14-thousand in 05-06 to more than 18-thousand this year. None of those Caps “fans” knew what hockey was five years ago, but now Ovechkin is a religious figure.
Any claims that DC is not a baseball town are partially untrue. Yes two franchises had failed in the past, but that was when the metro area was much smaller. It is now the 9th biggest region in the country. Second wealthiest and the most educated, all factors that play well into attracting baseball fans to the stands. And the Senators were a bigger joke than the Nationals have ever been.
First in War, First in Peace, Last in the National League East.
Merry Strasmas everyone!
Doesn’t the presence of Oakland and KC fairly near to whatever ratio this is supposed to be belie any notions of a unique fanbase? All DC, KC, and Oakland have in common really have been mostly bad teams and low ticket prices.
How do the Marlins have such a high TV audience? All the retirees down there tune in when the Marlins play the Mets and Cubs?
Will: Neither D.C. nor Oakland really have that cheap of seats. An average Nationals ticket in 2009 was $30.63 and an average Oakland ticket was $24.31 (MLB average in 2009 was $26.64). Source: http://tinyurl.com/ckrqok (teammarketing’s annual report)