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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Monday, October 15, 2012
I have spent so much time watching the Cardinals, reveling in their victories and agonizing in their defeats, that I had forgotten that the rest of the world was watching them, too. (I forget this sometimes, too. I love my sports teams so much that it almost seems strange that the other sports fans notice them at all. Sometimes I’ll see an Illini score on the ESPN crawl and it’s like Anderson Cooper doing a news item on how your cousin’s final exams at a college are going.) And the rest of the world, to my astoundment, hates the Cardinals. The rest of the world was cheering for the young, likable, fiery Washington Nationals, with their superstar youngsters and their facial hair and their natty natitude. The Cardinals weren’t the heroes to them; they were the brutish villains, the Cobra Kai, the Empire, stomping on the dreams of the upstart rebellion.
When did you start hating the Cardinals? Obviously everyone hates them now, but for me it was October 19, 2006. The Braves suddenly were no longer the team Phillies fans viewed with envy and hatred, for whom everything seemed to work out better than expected (in the regular season at least). The Cardinals easily slid into their place after destroying the hopes of the Mets and ruining what should have been an all-time classic moment (Endy Chavez Game 7 catch ... but his team lost). Since I know a lot of Mets fans and have never met a Cardinals fan, this was a formative moment.
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The last is clearly untrue: interest in baseball has never been higher than it is today and the vast majority of fans enjoy the expanded playoffs. It's only the self-appointed guardians of tradition who make ridiculous claims about the "true meaning" of this and that, as though Abner Doubleday descended from Mount Sinai with tablets of stone instructing the custodians of MLB to have only a single round of playoffs. There is no Constitution of Baseball to defend. Snap out of it.
--drove adam dunn out of town
--harrassed and nitpicked ken griffey jr thoughout his stay
Just following the lead of our HOF announcer, Harv...
edit: Adam Dunn is one of my favorite players ever, didn't want to see him leave, but, by 2008, it was time for he and the Reds to part ways. Jr got a raw deal, but, then he didn't come anywhere close to filling Reds fans expectations. Nor his own, most likely. Plus, neither of them were top-of-the-line starters and that's what the Reds really needed those years.
edit edit: Harveys, I should have read your next post. A lot of it was definitely Marty. As he goes, so follows the Reds' fan base.
You're on psychotropics if you think interest in the 2012 playoffs is higher than in the pre-wild card era. What's the evidence for this claim? The empty seats in Yankee Stadium for ALCS games? The sub-NFL-Draft TV ratings?
the reds fans didn't use to be like this. it's kind of alarming actually. the passion has a real edge to it.
And we'll take it in stride and follow our glorious leader (Whiney Herzog) and find a way to blame it on some random crap (Denkinger, Home field advantage etc) :)
I would prefer a plot that ensures multiple consecutive world series victory.
Yes, it's only the greedy owners who like a system that keeps more teams in contention later in the season. That's why teams drew 14,000 fans per game back in the Golden Age of 1968.
Teams like the Cardinals stay "in contention," but teams like the Yankees and Nationals don't get their just reward. Their just reward is a division title that means something, and a postseason spot much closer to the ultimate prize than a best-of-5 against the fifth-place team in the league.
I'm sure that the "fans" don't mind it; after all, the interests of the good but not great -- typically in the name of "fairness" -- will always trump the interests of the cream of the system and the truly accomplished. One wouldn't expect American fans to be able to distinguish the two.
Funnily enough, this was the game that turned me into a baseball fan.
the reds fans didn't use to be like this. it's kind of alarming actually. the passion has a real edge to it.
Harvey
I think living through Leatherpants Bowden's lying, Bob Boone, major league manager, and Fat Jimmy Haynes, Opening Day starter was enough to put the fanbase permanently on edge. :-) It's hard to imagine any of the current players being run out of town... This city truly loves the current team.
This was wrong yesterday, and it still is. The expanded playoffs are selling out everywhere except the new, expensive and unliked stadium of a team that has made the postseason almost every year for two decades, and which has fielded a 2012 team that its fanbase doesn't seem to like. NYS attendance in a vacuum from attendance at other parks is a terrible indicator of fan reaction to the "diluted" postseason, and it certainly isn't compelling.
You just have to laugh.....
You cannot be serious about this. That is the most backwards thing ever said on this site. Fan interest has risen because of expanded playoffs, to deny that is insane/ridiculous/stupid. Now if you are saying it might have diminished interest in the last seven games of the post season, there might be a little bit of truth to that, but on the whole, baseball popularity/profit/interest is much higher than it was in the 70's or 60's etc, and that was when they were basically the only game in town.
Actually, it's a leading indicator.
Not if attendance at NYS this postseason is your sole barometer for fan interest!
If you're talking about the regular season, we've been through this a million times -- attendance is higher because the mallparks are better places to while away a summer afternoon or evening than the parks of yore. Where there are no mallparks, yet very good teams (Oakland and Tampa), attendance is no different than 1975-91 and worse than in the best markets of that time. The Yankee Stadium attendances and ticket prices confirm this; there's no more demand to go to that mallpark for an LCS game than a whole bunch of regular season games. Why? Because large swaths of people aren't going for the baseball -- even in New York.
But the evidence is pretty clear that these things make MLB a lot of money relative to how they used to do it. MLB would be crazy not to keep with the trend.
I was telling someone the other day how much I love baseball and they asked how much I spend on it. It occured to me that I don't really spend anything on it. I bought Dad ExtraInnings once but don't have it myself. I don't subscribe to MLB online services. I haven't been to a MLB game in 5 years - and that was with family we were visiting and they paid.
Basically, I love the sport but the actual experience of attending is less and less gratifying. And I find the regular and post-seasons less and less compelling.
However, I'm a demographic outlier. I don't like most of the things that are very popular and like stuff that isn't. That doesn't make me cool and I'm not judging - a company would be a fool to make me a target.
Please explain, with reference to why every other team selling out all postseason games (except Texas's mid-day play-in, I believe) does not indicate sustained fan interest in the "diluted" postseason.
It's the beginning of a trend that's going to hit postseason gates and interest in other cities in the coming years. Fans in regular postseason participant markets will become blase about the tournament, as has clearly happened in New York.(*)
Of course, the measure of interest isn't just attendance; it's also TV ratings which continue to languish far below the ratings of LCS and World Series games of yore. People just aren't as interested in the baseball postseason as they used to be. There are too many games, too many flukish outcomes, too many matchups of the less deserving.
(*) I believe there has been a non-sellout in Detroit this postseason also.
The A's drew almost twice as many fans this year as they did in 1974, when they were in the process of winning their third consecutive World Series.
We haven't been through this before. I don't have a clue what a mallpark is. There is a game going on, you pay a ticket to go to a stadium, you watch the game. The stadium may or may not have other crap to do, if you consider St louis stadium to be a mallpark, then your definition of a mallpark is insane.
Attendance is up for lots of reasons, mostly being that there are more people in the population to go, but who cares why it's up, the simple fact of the matter is that it is up. Per game attendance over the past decade blows away per game attendance any time prior. It's not a debate, you can't debate facts.
That has to be the most uninformed comment ever. ALL tv ratings are down for everything. In the 70's and even the 80's a 20 share would land you in the bottom quartile of tv ratings and threaten you with cancellation, nowadays a 10 share is a hit show.
Surely the Cardinals would be a good test of this hypothesis?
Are you really this stupid?
What is it that you're envisioning happening here? And whatever it is, didn't it happen over ten years ago, with the vanguard being Atlanta? I think I was hearing jokes about Braves fans not caring about playoff games before I had my first email address.
And who are the "regular postseason participation markets" anyway, other than 1) New York, and 2) St. Louis, Home Of History's Best Fans who would obviously never become blasé?
Yes. I'm stunned you bother to follow the actual results at all. Why not just run 1000 Diamond Mind simulations instead? Hell, that's how they do things on Wall Street these days, right?
I know it's your habit to imagine people are saying things that they really aren't. All he is pointing out is that he considers teams with equal pyth to be equally talented teams. The standings are the standings. But when people say derisively about a team with a poor record who had a good pyth "they are only a 88 win team"... the point is that they were a more talented team than their actual won loss record indicates.
You don't have to agree with that, and he's not saying that the standings should be determined by pyth record, he's just saying that his evaluations/opinion of the quality of the team starts with pyth record over actual won/loss record.
1974 wasn't in my time period, and I've never called that time a "Golden Age" or any such thing.
The A's drew 1.3M more fans in 1990. They've drawn almost 3M to the Coliseum. They drew more in 1982 than 2012.
The 2012 A's also drew far fewer fans than went to the concrete circles in the late 70s, as shown by the following random figures:
Montreal, 1979: 2.1M
Philly, 1978: 2.5M
Cincy, 1978: 2.5M
San Fran, 1978: 1.7M
St. Louis, 1979: 1.6M
Los Angeles, 1978: 3.3M
Los Angeles, 1979: 2.8M
To be fair, Pittsburgh, which has never really drawn that well, drew only 1.4M to Three Rivers in 1979.
Then there's Tampa, a team that drew 1.55M to a grungy dome with a very appealing and successful young team. Let's compare good years for not quite as good a team that played in a grungy dome in the 80s:
Houston, 1980: 2.3M
Houston, 1986: 1.73M
Houston, 1987: 1.9M
Taken together with the TV ratings, which have precipitously dropped, there's little evidence that baseball qua baseball is any more popular now than it was 30 years ago.
(Eyeroll.) Fine, use 1975 then, even though leaguewide attendance dropped by a couple hundred thousand between the two seasons. This year's A's outdrew the division-winning, three-time-defending-champion '75 team by 600,000.
They didn't outdraw 1982 and they were 1.3M short of 1990. Though it's better than in a lot of years, the A's attendance is far short of peak. The population of the Bay Area and the United States has also grown since 1980; that alone should be driving attendance up.
And it's not just Oakland, it's Tampa.
Random? You choose a year for Montreal that they were 4th in attendance...let's look at that year.
Tm Attendance Attend/G 1979 National League
LAD 2860954 35320
PHI 2775011 34259
CIN 2356933 29462
MON 2102173 25953
HOU 1900312 23461
CHC 1648587 20353
STL 1627256 19845
SDP 1456967 17987
SFG 1456402 17980
PIT 1435454 17722
NYM 788905 9621
ATL 769465 9740
Best team drew an average of 35,000, worse team drew an average of 9700...
Let's look at this year.
Tm Attendance Attend/G 2012 National League
PHI 3565718 44021
SFG 3377371 41696
LAD 3324246 41040
STL 3262109 40273
CHC 2882756 35590
MIL 2831385 34955
COL 2630458 32475
ATL 2420171 29879
WSN 2370794 29269
CIN 2347251 28978
NYM 2242803 27689
MIA 2219444 27401
ARI 2177617 26884
SDP 2123721 26219
PIT 2091918 25826
HOU 1607733 19849
Very comparable.
The worse team(that is the 16th ranked team) Out drew 6 out of 12 teams(including my Cardinals), and the 15th worse team outdrew all but four teams from that year...yep attendance is an issue. (I hope you get the sarcasm)
If baseball has grown so much in core popularity, why are the crowds in Oakland tepid and the crowds in Tampa terrible? Tampa draws way less than the good Astro teams drew to the craptastic Astrodome in the 80s. Why do the A's draw way less than the concrete circles -- supposedly the worst creations in the history of man -- drew in the 70s and 80s?
I don't know what a mallpark is. Better designed stadium with comfort? Is St Louis a mall park, and if so, why?
Why don't you explain your disagreement? Try to use small words, so I can understand.....
Year Finish Attendance Attend/G Rank
2012 1 1679013 20729 12th of 14
2011 3 1476791 18232 14th of 14
2010 2 1418391 17511 13th of 14
2009 4 1408783 17392 14th of 14
2008 3 1665256 20559 13th of 14
2007 3 1921844 23726 12th of 14
2006 1 1976625 24403 12th of 14
2005 2 2109118 26038 8th of 14
2004 2 2201516 27179 7th of 14
2003 1 2216596 27365 6th of 14
2002 1 2169811 26788 8th of 14
2001 2 2133277 26337 7th of 14
2000 1 1603744 19799 11th of 14
1999 2 1434610 17711 12th of 14
1998 4 1232343 15214 13th of 14
1997 4 1264218 15608 14th of 14
1996 3 1148380 14178 14th of 14
1995 4 1174310 16310 12th of 14
1994 2 1242692 22191 13th of 14
1993 7 2035025 25124 11th of 14
1992 1 2494160 30792 4th of 14
1991 4 2713493 33500 3rd of 14
1990 1 2900217 35805 2nd of 14
1989 1 2667225 32929 2nd of 14
1988 1 2287335 28239 7th of 14
1987 3 1678921 20727 11th of 14
1986 3 1314646 15839 11th of 14
1985 4 1334599 16894 11th of 14
1984 4 1353281 16707 11th of 14
1983 4 1294941 15987 11th of 14
1982 5 1735489 21426 6th of 14
1981 1 1304052 23287 4th of 14
1980 2 842259 10398 12th of 14
1979 7 306763 3787 14th of 14
1978 6 526999 6587 14th of 14
1977 7 495599 6119 14th of 14
1976 2 780593 9637 11th of 12
1975 1 1075518 13278 6th of 12
1974 1 845693 10441 11th of 12
1973 1 1000763 12355 8th of 12
1972 1 921323 11965 5th of 12
1971 1 914993 11296 7th of 12
1970 2 778355 9609 9th of 12
1969 2 778232 9608 8th of 12
1968 6 837466 10090 8th of 10
Baltimore @ Texas was a night game. (Sorry, this is BBTF, where we correct things :) It didn't sell out, but it drew more fans than a lot of the Rangers' "sellouts" this year. I'd say there were >45K people in the seats. I went walkabout midgame because it was so desperately awful, and ended up in the only really open section, third deck in left field, where nobody ever sits. I think they didn't sell all the tickets because it wasn't till two days before that anybody in DFW suspected there could possibly be such a game, and when it happened it was a shock and a downer. But it still drew very well.
EDIT: To clarify "walkabout": I had a ticket in third deck, right field, which was packed, and I got tired of sitting next to other people, especially the nice young Orioles fan sitting next to me, who deserved to enjoy the game and not sit next to some goddamn Eeyore.
Likewise, when MLB expanded to have enough teams that it needed to let more than 4 of them into the playoffs, baseball became bad. It was inevitable. It couldn't withstand the trend from other sports which let virtually any team with a .500 record into the playoffs. Even though baseball still has far fewer playoff spots than other sports, it is now bad. Even the word "playoffs" is bad. It is not possible for more people to like baseball now than the number of people who liked it when it was good.
Even if you're a fan, you may subconsciously be less inclined to shell out the bucks to go to a place that is marketed as a dump.
LCS ratings are way up this year
Sure, they are -- and plenty of people do just that.
Here's a good ballpark vs. mallpark story published in SI a couple years ago -- it's about Philly:
As noted in Cliff zips beneath the overpass that leads to the Walt Whitman, the bridge no one needs to jump off anymore, and turns left onto Packer. Finally the forest of row houses sighs and surrenders to a vast clearing: the parking lot where the Vet used to be. Ahh, the memories... .
"It was San Quentin," says Head.
"It was a circular concrete slab of crap," says Boo.
"It was a green dying turd," says Dan Tarng, a first-generation Taiwanese-American fan who needs to meet Head and Boo.
"You'd sit there feeling like you needed to call the suicide hotline," says Jacklin Rhoads.
Jacklin? Is that ... a woman? Take a long look around as Citizens Bank Park's homey red bricks and towering light stanchions arise from the asphalt. Even now, four hours before game time, everywhere you look, something never seen before at ball games in Philly: females in droves. Queuing up for standing-room-only tickets, playing Beanbag Toss and Beer Pong amid a daily tailgating festival that used to materialize only on NFL Sundays. Teenage girls who don't hang at the mall anymore: They hang at CBP. Women in their 20s, 30s and 40s who don't have Girls Night Out or Happy Hour at bars or restaurants: They throw down light beer in the CBP parking lot, hard lemonades in the concourses, low-fat wraps and water ices on Ashburn Alley. They eyeball Cliff and Chase and Cole. The Phillies blew up San Quentin. They built Friday night on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore.
Exactly. SBB's position that the expanded playoffs are hurting fan interest follows perfectly from his dislike for the expanded playoffs, just not from reality.
Now, if he wanted to forecast a long-term trend of diluted talent following expansion (# of teams), that might have some basis in what we've seen this October... (cross quoted from another thread, and presented more for shock value than a serious endorsement of the hypothetical trend)
[146] No worries Bob, and thanks for confirming that it was indeed well attended.
Again, I still don't know what a mallpark is. Is it someplace that you have to pay a ticket to get into and then you can hang around?
ghastly I know, letting those womenfolk into what used to be solely a mans bastion where you could quietly contemplate suicide as you drink beer and watch a game in peace and quiet.
Coincidentally, or maybe not, the A's attendance figures reflect that. The game is no more popular now than when the A's had their big attendance run, and is almost certainly less popular.
Do people go to the boardwalk on the Jersey Shore on Friday night to watch baseball?
Is it someplace that you have to pay a ticket to get into and then you can hang around?
Yes. Maybe they don't do it in St. Louis, but yes.
Stadiums are no longer a bunch of seats, sparse restrooms, and a couple hot dog and beer stands. They're now a bunch of more comfortable seats, nightclubs, restaurants, cocktail lounges, wide areas to mingle and walk, and stores. With more and higher-quality chicks hanging out. Of course you're going to get more people to come to those places.
You're using a silly metaphor to prove a point?
I don't think he knows what a mallpark is, it's just a catch word he heard someplace and latched onto and now think every new park is one of those.
Ok, what is wrong with that. You go to a game and you want to be comfortable, why would you want to pay outrageous prices for beer and food and not get good beer and food? or have a selection of choices?
Your definition of a mallpark is basically a well designed stadium that it isn't a chore to go to? People aren't paying ticket prices to get the privilege of paying for overpriced food. They are paying ticket prices to go to a game, comfort just makes it a more pleasurable experience.
Coincidentally the A's were a really good team in those six years.
Nothing. And a lot is right with that.
But that fact explains, to a large if not definitive degree, why baseball's attendance has gone up. It's not the underlying popularity of the sport itself, or the experience of paying attention to it live -- thus Oakland and Tampa -- it's the fact that a lot of people who don't care about baseball go to baseball games now that didn't BITD. Thus, we can't just say, "Attendance higher, popularity higher."
well i've been on this board constantly suggesting that baseball expand to 32 teams and do 8 4-team divisions and just get rid of the wild card. of course then you'll have whiny babies crying about teams winning crummy divisions and then getting hot.
the heck with it. you can't please everybody.
But we can and should say "lower attendance (at NYS, ignoring every other ballpark), popularity will eventually fall due to expanded playoffs"? I'm confoosed.
fun's fun, but that's a pretty serious accusation.
gee, thanks. i've been on this board since well before registration (with the same handle too) and never been nominated for a primey. i guess that doesn't speak well for the quality of my posts. oh well.
It's a good sign that most of the casual fans are young. There are so many tickets available that a lot less people are priced out of going to baseball games than they are from NBA or NFL.
Not really at all. Oakland's popularity is caused by the fact that the owner has bad mouth the team and the stadium, poor marketing is not the same thing as nationwide interest has waned. And Tampa is an expansion team that is a poor market and is still outdrawing many of the teams were, when you point to your sweet spot.
The facts are 1. baseball is drawing more fans. 2. the 12 rank team in attendance is drawing more fans than the 4th rank team fro your sweet spot 3. the lower drawing teams are also drawing better than the majority. No matter how you slice it you cannot deny the facts.
The better ballpark experience drives popularity. The increased competitiveness drives popularity. More teams being in the post season hunt, means more fans in more cities, you don't have a handful of teams with good attendance and a majority with poor attendance, instead you have a majority with good attendance, a couple with poor attendance.
No matter how you look at it, those are the facts.
2012 attendence.
Tm Attendance Attend/G
PHI 3565718 44021
NYY 3542406 43733
TEX 3460280 42720
SFG 3377371 41696
LAD 3324246 41040
STL 3262109 40273
LAA 3061770 37800
BOS 3043003 37568
DET 3028033 37383
CHC 2882756 35590
MIL 2831385 34955
MIN 2776354 34276
COL 2630458 32475
ATL 2420171 29879
WSN 2370794 29269
CIN 2347251 28978
NYM 2242803 27689
MIA 2219444 27401
ARI 2177617 26884
SDP 2123721 26219
BAL 2102240 25954
TOR 2099663 25922
PIT 2091918 25826
CHW 1965955 24271
KCR 1739859 21480
SEA 1721920 21258
OAK 1679013 20729
HOU 1607733 19849
CLE 1603596 19797
TBR 1559681 19255
1988 your sweet spot
Tm Attendance Attend/G
NYM 3055445 38193
MIN 3030672 37416
LAD 2980262 36793
STL 2892799 35714
NYY 2633701 32921
TOR 2595175 32039
BOS 2464851 30430
KCR 2350181 29377
CAL 2340925 28900
OAK 2287335 28239
CHC 2089034 25476
DET 2081162 25693
CIN 2072528 25907
PHI 1990041 24568
HOU 1933505 23870
MIL 1923238 23744
PIT 1866713 23046
SFG 1785297 22041
BAL 1660738 20759
TEX 1581901 19530
SDP 1506896 18604
MON 1478659 18255
CLE 1411610 17427
CHW 1115749 13775
SEA 1022398 12622
ATL 848089 10735
6 teams with higher attendance than the best team in 1988. Yes there are more teams(by 4) than in that past, 2012 has 8 teams with over 3 mil in attendance, 0 teams with under 1.5 mil in attendance(compared to 5)... it's not a debate.
now we know approximately when sugar bear shooting blanks was 12.
The rest of the part that you quoted tells you when he was 12.
Yes, and there are no other differences between the city of Houston and the city of St. Petersburg that could possibly explain this disparity. Nope. None at all.
Anyway, if the change in parks is solely responsible for the increase in attendance, let's look at the teams who've played in the same park since the beginning of the LCS era. Here they are:
Red Sox - Average attendance from 1969-93: 24,868. Average from 1994-2012: 33,490. Difference: +8,622.
Angels - Average from 1969-93: 23,430. Average from 1994-2012: 33,464. Difference: +10,034.
Well, those teams have both played better in the Wild Card era than they did in the "at least the team won SOMETHING" era. But there are a few that haven't:
Dodgers - Average from 1969-93: 34,681. Average from 1994-2012: 41,175. Difference: +6,494. (Declined by 11 points of winning percentage, and haven't won a pennant in the Wild Card era after winning five pennants and two titles in the LCS era.)
Cubs - Average from 1969-93: 20,959. Average from 1994-2012: 35,065. Difference: +14,106. (Declined by 7 points of winning percentage; obviously haven't won a pennant in either period. This year's 101-loss team outdrew the 1984 division champs by over 9,000 fans per game. EDIT: This year's 101-loss team actually outdrew EVERY SINGLE CUB TEAM from the LCS-only era.)
A's (as discussed above) - Average from 1969-93: 17,233. Average from 1994-2012: 20,915. Difference: +3,682.
Those mallparks sure are powerful - they can even draw fans to other stadiums.
There were a lot of women around, but the rest of this phrase corresponds to my last three nights at the Ballpark :-D
I had quit reading and was going to make a similar 12 year old comment, and went back and caught it.
I'm not sure who is more pigheaded, SBB or Sam. Sbb is at least not an idiot, even if his brain isn't able to properly connect logic circuits.
Then we got older, and baseball (and everything else) changed.
Now, baseball (and everything else) kinda sucks.
And to make things worse, scads of ignorant young people are enjoying baseball (and everything else), even though we know it's an inferior product.
If only baseball (and everything else) could be the way it was.
And we could be young again.
And we could be young again.
This sort of thing is the reason that the Specs Toporcer entry is my favorite chapter in The Glory of Their Times. Toporcer always had bad vision (hence the nickname), but he went more or less completely blind after his playing career ended. Because of that, he obviously wasn't able to watch the players who came after him, but he still listened to him on the radio. And because he was therefore seeing them through the excited eyes of a radio announcer rather than the jaded ones of a former player, he rediscovered the sense of awe that so many of his fellow retirees seem to lose.
I was thinking of something along similar lines. Baseball when I was younger was more enjoyable, but so was Star Wars and so was Battle of the Planets and math and Soccer(Indoor) and it's not like I like them less nowadays(well maybe soccer) but it's that I have so many other interest that I can't dedicate my interest so single purposely. It's the sad part of growing up, but it doesn't really mean you have lost interest it's just that you have to compartmentalize your interests.
The inability of stat dorks to distinguish predictive analysis from "things that have actually happened in the world" is...tedious.
That's rich, coming from the guy who claims the Cardinals didn't win real championships because they didn't have the best regular season record...
Yep, from what I understand, mallparks are any new baseball stadium that draws a lot of people (or any stadium that draws a lot of people). To be a true ballpark, you have to have worse attendance, because popularity is down for baseball because of expanded playoffs. Anything contradicting this is just random noise to be ignored.
I do love that the mallpark article pointed out that, GASP... Females are actually showing up at games. Oh, the humanity!
And the anti-Cards rhetoric is pretty hilarious as well.
oddly enough, i'd put it the other way around. sam facebooks much better than he btfs.
sorry to use those words as verbs, you know what i mean.
Because I don't really consider you worth the effort.
I never claimed the Cards didn't win the tournament games. I merely scare-quoted "championship' to show my derision for the "skill" required to do as much. Also, lick my sack.
Boy, if that doesn't clinch an argument, nothing does!
I have mad debating skills. I was in debate club and everything.
Wow. Ignorant, stupid, and lazy. Impressive.
It only gets better the closer you get, baby.
But the widely accepted premise on this thread that the Cardinals have a knack for above average luck, or have a clever plan for underachieving in the regular season, is alarming! Among a select group of people who are supposed to understand numbers! This is exactly what led to the financial crisis. Well, that and a bunch of greed.
Sure, the Cards were lucky to have the Braves collapse last year (and they were lucky to finally have Allen Craig and David Freese healthy). So let's go back to ancient history: 2010. The Cardinals again were again cleverly a little above .500 and watched the postseason from home. Digging even further back into the archives: 2009, the lucky Cardinals rode their division championship into the playoffs and were shut down 3-0 by the Dodgers. 2008: they were again cleverly a little above .500 and finished 4th in the weak-ass central division. In 2007 it looks like they hadn't figured out the secret to success was to be a little ABOVE .500. In 2006, they were genuinely lucky. And in 2005 they owned the best record in baseball, the only 100-win team, and they were taken out by the Houston Astros.
Or, you could look at more than an 8-year sample. If you look at the entire history of the World Series, the Cardinals have won just over three more of them than you'd expect based on their playoff appearances. That's the second-most among the 30 franchises, trailing only (of course) the Yankees.
Isn't that a textbook example of an increase in popularity? Baseball has attracted a lot of new fans using creative marketing.
Or are you arguing that in the old days, baseball was so popular nobody went to the ballparks anymore, they were too crowded?
Oh, and the rule ought to be that you can't make contact with the infielder past the bag. I'd expect Holliday shouldn't dig in his first AB against the Giants next spring.
This is the craziest thing I have read in this thread (including SBB relentlessly stating you can not compare old and new ballparks for attendence, while using TV ratings decline as a sure sign of decreased interest - hey SBB the media landscape has changed more than the ballparks have).
Sports hate is fun. Booing AJ Pierogi and Captain Dreamboat is fun. I was not actually happy when the Captain hurt his ankle, but I was sports hate happy. As a human I wish nothing but the best for Mr. Jeter, as a Yankee Icon he is the object of scorn. it is not personal and is not real, but it helps give a interest in games and someone to cheer for or against.
And both SBB and Sam have their moments. Sam is more clearly an internet construct and on those terms is entertaining, but SBB has his moments.
I have a very mild sports hate for the Cards. I am a mild Cubs fan (from my time in Chicago) and dislike TLR, but thatis about as far as it goes. My baseball sports hate is reserved for the Yankee's and Dodgers, though the Red Sox are really trying to evoke it and gthe Braves are fairly aweful as well.
Not in my eyes. More people going to the property where baseball is played to do things other than watch baseball does not equal an increase in popularity.
And I'm still confused about Oakland and Tampa -- the only non-mallpark, non-icon stadiums in baseball. How is baseball in Oakland "more popular than ever" when attendance is down ca. 40% from its peak? Particularly when, as is likely, fewer people in the A's market watch the postseason games on TV than in the late 80s/early 90s?
How is baseball in Tampa "popular" at all?
Ah, the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy. They go to ballparks, pay admission, watch the game, cheer the players, but they aren't true fans!
Angels Stadium?
Same with the Nats park.
Never been there. It's been renovated a bunch, likely converted from ballpark to mallpark -- that's, you know, kind of the point of the renovations. The Angels drew 2.8M plus to it when it was a concrete circle, multi-purpose "monstrosity." Looks like they averaged 2.4-2.5 M in the 80s.
If it draws more people and is anything more than a baseball field, seats, and maybe (can't be sure) one concession stand, mallpark
Drawing more people isn't a prerequisite. For example, the Orioles drew ca. 350,000 more fans to multipurpose, circular Memorial Stadium in 1990 and 1991 than to mallpark Camden Yards in 2012 -- and for worse teams.
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