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1. Home Run Teal & Black Black Black Gone! Posted: June 30, 2009 at 10:46 PM (#3238246)Winners/Losers Interleague attendance (Pt1) Marlins see the highest increase over last year (31.39%), but still have lowest Interleague average (22,457) of all 30 clubs.
this article surprised me in that it was the first article I ever remember reading that didn't have a decidedly anti-interleague bent. Of course if you would have read the article, the only 16.1 percent increase is really hurt by the Mets and Yankees new stadium having a large drop in attendence.
I know people love to try and find the lack of attendence or whatever is about interleague to discredit it, but it still seems like it's been successful even though MLB hasn't really done the best job of marketing it as special (why have interleague weeks instead of interleague games spread throughout the season so that ESPN could promote significant interleague series as game of the week so that we don't get the same Yankee/Red Sox, Cards/Cubs and Dodgers/Giants series that seems to dominate their lineup)
Day # Avg. Att
Sunday 54 34,810
Monday 6 32,683
Tuesday 30 30,453
Wednesday 30 31,183
Thursday 26 31,621
Friday 58 33,058
isn't there a monetary component to the announced crowds when it comes to revenue sharing? I mean it's in the home teams best interest to claim less attendence so they don't have to pay out as much. (of course I guess that is the difference between ticket sold and actual attendence, I've never understood the argument for worrying about actual attendence, except as a minor bragging point)
Teams should worry about actual attendance. Actual attendees spend a bit more on parking/beer/food/souvenirs than no-shows.
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ok, that part I agree, but I meant in reporting issues that people complain about. From a fans point of view what is the difference? I guess it makes the stadium look less crowded, but it's funny hearing people trying to predict attendence numbers looking at a crowd.
Saturday (58 games) (avg. attendance 36,145)
+1. Play the rivalry games home-and-home, and get the most attractive matchups you can otherwise.
Let's see:
Mets-Yankees
Orioles-Nats
Braves-Red Sox (because of the Boston connection)
Rays-Marlins
Reds-Indians
Cubs-White Sox
Cardinals-Royals
Astros-Rangers
Giants-A's
Brewers-Twins
Dodgers-Angels
That leaves the Blue Jays, Tigers, and Mariners in the AL and Phillies, Pirates, Rockies, Diamondbacks, and Padres in the NL. The Blue Jays can play the Phillies (who were called the Blue Jays once upon a time), the Pirates can play the Tigers (it's not a natural rivalry but they did meet in a WS 100 years ago), and the three western NL teams can rotate against the Mariners.
What happens when you take the rivalry games out of the mix?
-- MWE
I think the Red Sox are probably the best visiting draw for NL home teams (and for AL games, generally speaking - I'm watching the Red Sox at Baltimore the last two nights, and I swear there are more Red Sox fans than there are Orioles fans). The Yankees would draw very well, too. As for NL teams coming to AL parks, I don't really know. I'd guess the Cubs.
+1. Play the rivalry games home-and-home, and get the most attractive matchups you can otherwise.
not really my cup of tea, I think they should do it better but there isn't a team in the national league that doesn't want to see a matchup against the Yankees. Regardless of rivalry. Heck I'm not even a fan of the home/away rivalries, six games between two teams that live in close proximity isn't really necessary, alternate them year after year.
of course my real solution will never happen and that is to go to three 5 team divisions in both leagues and there is an interleague game every day. It also makes it easier to schedule while maintaining fairness within the division(outside of the rivalry thing)
Rather than comparing interleague games by day of week or by year, I think it's more important to ask the following question: for each franchise, what visiting team from the other league would give the largest average bump in attendance?
isn't that pretty obvious though? Yankees, Red Sox(thanks ESPN) Cardinals (maybe) Cubs, Mets, Phillies, Dodgers. Not sure what that really does knowing that though.
I agree for the reasons you mentioned. I'd expand it throughout the year -- the entire league doesn't have to be an IL schedule at the same time.
It is the Yankees.
I stand corrected -- is that for all years of IL play or just this year?
Failing that, Pittsburgh is a reasonable choice. It's a geographically close and economically/commercially similar city, albeit much smaller, though I never sensed a rivalry between Pittsburgh and Detroit like the one with Cleveland or Chicago.
Okay, but why over the Twins? Minnesota/Wisconsin anything is a huge rivalry. As a city, Detroit may have more in common with Milwaukee than Minnesota does, but that's about it. Maybe if the Tigers move to the UP.
I blame Chris Truby.
That's one downside. But the biggest downside is that it irretreivably undermines the concept of competitive integrity of schedule.
True, but not much more so than an imbalanced intra-league schedule when the power distribution among the divisions is out of whack. And while it's true that (for example) the NL East teams this year, having had to run the AL East gauntlet, will be at a disadvantage come October, this balances out on a year to year basis. And in fact it isn't all that much worse than the common case of Team A playing Team C when Team C's rotation is at full strength, while when Team B played Team C, Team C's rotation was MIA. It's not that what you're saying isn't correct, but like so many other things, it really just comes down to the luck of the draw, and the luck of the draw is part of the game.
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I loved the 12-team leagues where teams played their five division rivals 18 times apiece and the divisions closed in on themselves in September.
I didn't mind that myself, but let's not pretend that there was anything equitable about it, in the years when the best two or three teams in a league were all in the same division, while the third or fourth best team got into the playoffs. (Hello, 1973 NL East!)
The only way to get around the "competitive integrity" problem is to go back to two leagues with perfect round robin scheduling and no interleague play. I'm not sure how well that would work in the real world of 30 teams, especially when it would eliminate half a dozen Yankees-Red Sox games, etc.
It was. And, yes, yes, I fully realize that in the modern 30-team setup and with modern economics, it's never coming back. But acknowledging that shouldn't prevent us from simultaneously acknowledging that it was a superior scheduling model to anything that can be arranged nowdays. Just because the old fart is annoying when he rants about how much better something was back in the day doesn't mean he isn't right sometimes.
For its time it was undoubtedly the best arrangement, both in its simplicity and in the sense that it maintained each league's distinctiveness, which aside from the DH is pretty much nonexistent today.**
But that said, for the sake of preserving a bit more suspense in the buildup World Series, you also had entire decades pass by where two teams in the same city never met each other in anything other than a series of occasional exhibition games. In their 54 year history, the Philadelphia A's never once met the Phillies in a "game that mattered," the Red Sox never once met the Boston Braves, and the Chicago and St. Louis matchups took place exactly once each. That's a price that wasn't quite as meaningless as you implicitly suggest, regardless of the unarguable merits of those 22/7 days. And as you can see by my response, this is not really any sort of a generational split. I just like to see natural rivalries (and even a few unnatural ones) on a yearly basis.
**and of course you want to do away with that sole remaining bit of distinctiveness, but that's another story
IIRC at one point in the "second half" of 1981 the entire AL East had a better W-L percentage than every team in the AL West. You simply cannot ensure equity of schedule as long as you have divisional play and a postseason LCS.
And as I'm sure you realize, my response to this is, "So what?" I don't consider that to be a problem.
Yes, and 7-team divisions meant that there was always an inter-division series being played (just as there is today, of course). This led to things like the Blue Jays and the Twins playing each other down the stretch in 1991 and then turning around and playing each other in the ALCS, just a preview of the goofy situations that the Wild Card brings about.
Andy's right that no divisional schedule is equitable, but then no playoff system is completely equitable (except for massive elimination tournaments, like cup tournaments in soccer, or the NCAA conference basketball tournaments that are followed by March Madness, where almost all the teams have a chance to advance). There were many years before 1969 when the second-best team in baseball stayed home and some scruffy bunch made it to the World Series.
All you have to do is pay attention to some of the games on TV or go there to see just how meaningless the announced crowd numbers have become.
The disparity between these numbers and the actual crowd size has become bigger than ever in some places. The last couple of games in Miami have seen crowds that are clearly fewer than 2,000 people.
With a couple of exceptions, attendance is definitely down across the board; it's not just an interleague thing.
It's impossible for AL and NL teams to be 'rivals' with one another in any real sense, unless they meet each other in the World Series several times. They're not competing for the same thing.
I dunno; USC and Notre Dame are great, long-time football rivals, and they don't compete directly for anything at all, unless by chance they some day meet in a BCS Championship game. I suspect that, way back in the day, some of the "city series" games like the Cubs/White Sox matchups were better draws than unimportant stretch series during the championship season. A "rivalry" just means that it's especially pleasant to beat the other guys.
Yes, although I suppose you could say they're competing for the loyalties of the local fanbase. That said, and I know I'm different from lots of fans in this way, but I've never gotten the idea of having to choose between which local team (NL or AL) to support: the beauty of the situation is that you can support them both, precisely because they aren't competing for the same thing, until and unless they meet in the WS. I'm obviously primarily a Giants' fan, but I like the A's, too. The "Bay Bridge Series" they play each year has never gotten me excited.
MLB and college football are apples and oranges.
It's impossible for AL and NL teams to be 'rivals' with one another in any real sense, unless they meet each other in the World Series several times. They're not competing for the same thing.
Tell that to New York or Chicago fans, who don't seem to see it that way.
Yes, although I suppose you could say they're competing for the loyalties of the local fanbase. That said, and I know I'm different from lots of fans in this way, but I've never gotten the idea of having to choose between which local team (NL or AL) to support: the beauty of the situation is that you can support them both, precisely because they aren't competing for the same thing, until and unless they meet in the WS. I'm obviously primarily a Giants' fan, but I like the A's, too. The "Bay Bridge Series" they play each year has never gotten me excited.
You'd appreciate this, Steve: The only time I lived in the Bay Area for any extent of time was in the late Summer and early Fall of 1971. I rooted the A's and the Giants** into the playoffs, and had tickets for both the three ALCS games in Oakland and all seven possible World Series games. You know the rest of the story, I'm sure.
** Do you remember that famous Labor Day game in the Stick when the temperature was something like 104 degrees? That was when the Giants and Dodgers fans (a pretty even split, IIRC) each spent a small fortune buying up each other's pennants, just so they could burn them in full view, in what was their idea of the supreme act of disrespect. As much of a total AL fan as I've always been, that's always been in my top 10 list of regular season games.
I am a Chicago fan.
It wasn't Labor Day; the Giants played the Dodgers in LA on Labor Day of '71. (The first of a five-game sweep by the Dodgers in the home-and-home showdown, ushering in that nightmarishly tense September.)
But, yeah, games against the Dodgers at Candlestick had a certain refinement to them, didn't they?
Sure, but they are in the same general category of "competitions people will pay to see" :) In the case of Yankees/Mets, it's more than just another set of nearby ballgames for your local team.
When you get down the chain to Astros/Rangers, it probably is more just another set of nearby ballgames. Those games draw well, but "rivalry"? I think not ...
It wasn't Labor Day; the Giants played the Dodgers in LA on Labor Day of '71. (The first of a five-game sweep by the Dodgers in the home-and-home showdown, ushering in that nightmarishly tense September.)
You're right; it was this game, on Tuesday, September 14th, where the Giants bullpen blew a two run lead in the top of the ninth, and where it ending with Hoyt Wilhelm striking out Willie Mays.
Beyond the Death Valley-like temperature and the dueling pennant fires, what I also remember about that evening was briefly walking out onto the Astroturf after the game, and recoiling in horror at just how artificial it felt. I know that sounds stupid, because of course I knew that it was nothing but glorified plastic, but this was the first time I'd ever actually had it under my feet. I'd been to Candlestick several times before that, but had never walked onto the field. AFAIC in many ways that shlt was even worse than steroids, and I still can't believe how long the players put up with it.
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