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1. Styles P. Deadball Posted: April 12, 2012 at 09:51 AM (#4104789)"Remember, tomorrow night is Diehard Night. Free admission to anyone who was actually alive the last time the Indians won a pennant."
Oh, and Styles, remember 1997? And 1995? This isn't the North Side of Chicago.
Juuuuust a bit outside.
Is he still a stathead favorite, on the basis that he read Mind Game or something?
No.
I predict the sell-out streak ends when the A's roll into town...but *that* isn't happening any time soon.
*Last* Year when they were 23-13, they drew 18,000 for a midweek day game. The next saturday day game they had, they drew 40,000.
Cleveland genuinely loves the Indians. It's just that they aren't going to spend their money to watch whatever it is that was yesterday, and the Dolan group has been unspeakably bad at promoting the team. It's as if they expect tens of thousands of fans to pile into the stadium every day just because there's a ballgame, regardless of the quality of the players on the field.
They aren't even trying to win.
Case in point: 2007. The Tribe drafted 48 players that year. Those 48 players have combined for -0.2 WAR in the majors.
Negative zero point two!It was a cold, windy noon midweek game. The perfect storm of low attendance.
Dolan bought the team before the 2000 season. In 1999, the Indians had a payroll of 70 million or so. Dolan bumped it up to 76 million, then 93 million. The team that Jacobs left Dolan got old quick, and didn't have much of a farm system as John Hart loved to shoot off top prospects for the likes of Dave Burba and Ricardo Rincon, so a bit of a teardown was necessary.
And Dolan got the payroll back up to 80 million despite fans unwillingness to show up. And I know, everyone in Cleveland complains that Dolan can't keep star players. As if the Indians have ever been able to keep their stars, or they were going to outbid the Yankees for Sabathia.
Cleveland doesn't love the Indians. They've only ever shown up for that team during the mid 90s run, when they had a brand new stadium, and a division that produced just one other team over .500 from 95-99, and just one team that broke 90 wins from 95-01.
And tens of thousands of fans generally pile into a stadium to see a team even if its just .500, I'm not sure why Dolan shouldn't expect something similar. And I think the Indians do a pretty good job promoting the team, they hold plenty of non-baseball events to get other types of people to the stadium, and their management is very accessible.
Let's not get too selective on the trades here. Shapiro may be overrated, but he's shown to be at least competent.
Middle third is a pretty tricky description. We know the exact numbers. 9th, which is what they got when they led the league in wins in 2007, and they were 12th when they barely missed the playoffs in 2005. That's not a town that loves baseball. That's a town that waits until you make the playoffs and then goes "oh, we always loved you!"
If it was so easy to pry away future all-stars from Bavasi for a halfway decent 1B platoon, you would think more people would have done it.
This describes every city. There is always a lag with attendance because you sell season ticket packages in the offseason. The fact that they finished 9th again in 2008 when they were a .500 team shows this. Had they been good in 2008, it's likely they would have finished much higher in attendance.
Its been awhile, but it did happen.
Its not like Cleveland looks like an awful team - many have them finishing 2nd in the division. I understand April attendance is usually pretty crummy for small market clubs, but that game gave me flashbacks to old Municipal Stadium.
Look, we counted exactly 800 people at this Pirates game! Oh, it was a rescheduled second part of a doubleheader and it was at 2PM on a Monday. WATFO?
I understand the lag factor. I'm still saying 9th is pretty bad for a town that claims to "love" the team following a best-record-in-baseball season and during a .500 season. To me, that's a town that's pretty meh on baseball.
The issue I have is that so many Cleveland fans blame that sonuvabitch Dolan's incompetence as the reason they don't spend their hard earned dollars on baseball anymore, but then they have no problem buying PSL's for the local football team and turning old buses into huge Browns helmets, despite that team making the Indians look brilliant. I get it, you'd much rather watch bad football than mediocre baseball. But don't blame anyone else for that.
They started poorly in 08. Losing records in April(12-15), May(12-15), June(12-16), and July(10-14), before finishing well(18-10 in Aug and 16-11 in Sept) to get to .500. That sort of thing is going to depress ticket sales. Reverse the order of those monthly records and I bet they have a significantly better attendance.
It wasn't a highly impressive record at 22-21, but they were in first place through May 17. And they reversed that process in 2011, and finished . . . exactly in the same spot, 9th.
Which isn't bad considering that they were coming off a 69-93, 4th place year...
So, if they want to just get to middle of the pack attendance-wise, they have to have a fantastic season, then they have to start out real hot the next season. Sounds like a town that is pretty meh on baseball.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with your premise, but it's worth noting the mid to late 90s were also when Cleveland didn't have a football team.
Yes, if they want to be better than 9th or so, it would take more than a single season of good play. I have zero doubt that if they could sustain say two or three years of finishing 1st or 2nd in their division, they would be better than 9th in attendance by the second year.
EDIT: This makes Cleveland no different than about 20 other MLB cities.
It wasn't even like that 10 years ago!
But save for a few markets like NY, Boston and St. Louis (and I don't even know if its true in St. Louis since they've had a remarkable run of never really being crummy), this is probably going to be true. Unless you have a nice multi-year run where fans are pretty confident you're going to be a good team, attendance is likely going to be "meh."
In fairness, they had no second- or third-round pick that year, and 4th rounder TJ McFarland is a good bet to log some ML time as a LHRP. They also failed to sign two other fairly high picks: Cole St. Clair (7th) and Matt Hague (11th). Hague is currently in the majors with the Pirates, and St. Clair is looking pretty decent as a bullpen lefty in the Dodgers' system.
You want to see a team completely biff a draft, I give you the 1994 Pirates. Full complement of picks, including the #11 overall (#12-14 were Nomar Garciaparra, Paul Konerko, and Jason Varitek), and only two of the 46 players they drafted made the majors: Ninth-rounder Fat Jimmy Anderson (-0.3 WAR) and 46th-rounder Brandon Larson (who didn't sign, and who put up -1.4 WAR for the Reds a few years later).
I think the Browns have been doing that when it comes to player personnel.
I'm not arguing against either of those, in fact I completely agree. They both say that Cleveland is "meh" on baseball. What I'm arguing against is the fans who point to the sellout streak as proof that the town loves baseball, and anything wrong is completely on Dolan.
Future All-Star Rafael Soriano for something called Horacio Ramirez.
When the Yankees were "really crummy" in 1992, they drew 1.7 million, which is less than what the Indians drew in 2011, in spite of the enormous New York advantage in the population base. Don't ever kid yourself about the willingness of any team's fans to keep supporting mediocrity.
The very slow starts under Eric Wedge that had the team buried in May didn't help attendance either.
People who hang out on baseball message boards can make reasoned arguments about how there was nothing ownership could have done, how management should have had better drafts, etc, but the guy still whining about "trading" Omar Vizquel is the one who has to buy tickets regularly if you're going to finish with good attendance.
Winning consistently is the only way to repair the brand. Ownership and management has not delivered and people aren't showing up. Big surprise.
The other team in Ohio had a day game yesterday afternoon. They drew 20,672.
Since the beginning of FA, when haven't the Indians' stars left? At least they've produced some in recent years.
I guess 20 games of play is enough to warrant a judgment on the season, as long as its a bad 20 games.
It's not like this is the Pirates. They've been basically a .500 team under current ownership. I'm not sure why a middle of the pack attendance is seen as such a feat.
They spent lots of money to keep Grady Sizemore and Travis Hafner around. Oh well.
I doubt the other team in Ohio was dealing with the rain/snow mix we were.
I think their are plenty of Cleveland sports fans that love the Tribe. Its not tough to find water cooler talk about the team around town. The problem is the majority of these people know much more about football personnel moves than baseball, and don't understand why we can't trade up to draft some stud and put him right in the lineup, and why we don't just spend spend spend then cut those guys when they get hurt/suck.
Plus I think the poor starts are a pretty big factor, when added to the weather. Cleveland is a pretty suburban town and the weather doesn't get good until May. If the weather is good in April we are spending time with the start of year yard work. I just took a look at the schedule and May 7 is the first game I will be able to attend, for a lot of fans this is the case and if the team is in a hole by then it kills their enthusiasm.
Which of you other guys are in Cleveland right now? What do you think?
Against the Cardinals, with whom they have a bit of a rivalry going. Probably a fair number of visiting fans in that 20K too. Reds attendance hasn't generally been anything to write home about either, and Cincinnati definitely considers itself a baseball town.
Sorry, that ship has sailed.
This sounds like an Oriole story if you just replace Nolan with Angelos or a Pittsburgh story and replace whoever with whoever. OUR TOWN used to have a great team, and a huge payroll and we used to fill the stands. We signed the best players in baseball from the minor league draft and OUR TOWN is one of the great baseball towns in America.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/LAD/attend.shtml
Wrong. The Dodgers will draw under any circumstances.
The Dodgers are the closest thing to an exception to the rule, but then they've never really had a stretch of more than a year or two in Los Angeles where they really stunk up the joint. Up until the recent fiasco, they were always one of the best run franchises around, from the team on the field to the ballpark itself, which featured some of the lowest ticket prices in baseball.
Although they did struggle at the gate during WWI.
You're talking about the year that they drew fewer fans in the entire season than they did in one World Series game in 1959.
Second, the 2005 team didn't make the playoffs. There's a huge revenue spike for making it (I'm less certain about attendance. Attendance is actually harder to build a good model for than revenue, but revenue is what really matters), and I found no evidence that coming close matters at all. (Something close to 2/3 of the revenue bonus comes in the following season. Shouldn't be a surprise). Absolute number of wins don't seem to matter all that much either.
There's also the issue that roller-coaster teams don't draw as well as consistent (good) teams (consistent bad teams draw consistently poorly). Best I can tell it's because casual fans incline to a somewhat pessimistic viewpoint (strictly a WAG -- it's consistent with what I see but there are other possible explanations)
Basically Cleveland's revenue and attendance are pretty normal given demographics and the quality of teams they've fielded.
EDIT: Yeah, refresh. Sigh.
Albert Belle, Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome, and CC Sabathia were on their ways to the HOF when they left. Toss Bartolo Colon, Cliff Lee, and Victor Martinez (to divisional rival in an equally broken city) on top of that and it's a pretty tough pill to swallow.
To make it worse, Belle, Ramirez, and Thome left during the period where the Indians were selling out regularly. That you can't keep your stars no matter how many tickets you sell is one hell of a message to send to fans.
This is a rational argument, but not one that matters to a casual fan. From their perspective, the Indians' season was over (to point out just one example) on May 8, 2005 when they were 11.5 games out.
It's not a feat. It's mediocre, just like the past decade of Indians baseball.
Replace "can't keep" with "won't keep" and that senetence is spot on.
It's one thing to say to fans, "we can't afford to keep all our stars". It's another to be too cheap to keep any of them.
Manny left after the 2000 season to go to Boston on a 8 year 160 million dollar contract.
Jim Thome left after the 2002 season to go to Philadelphia on a 6 year 85 million dollar contract.
Just signing Belle would have kept the band together until 2000 or at the very least until 1998. Instead of signing Belle they sign David Justice to a 4 year extension that will pay him 7 million a year through 2002. They were already on the hook for 12.5 million for 1997 and 1998. So instead of signing Belle for 55 million they instead signed Justice for 41 million. Hart then threw money at Marquis Grissom that same season. Giving him a 25 million 5 year extension on his contract as well. About the only thing right Hart did that year was sign Thome to an extension as well.
After letting Manny go they drop 15 million in 2001 for Eliis Burks and Juan Gonzalez.
But he didn't get to the Tigers until he'd spent a year and a half with the Red Sox, to whom they had traded him for a pitcher who's now reached near-ace status with the Indians.
Hart could have had Belle for four years, 44 million. This was a public offer from Belle's agent, who at Belle's request, was offering a large hometown discount. After Hart, left Cleveland, he said that he never had any intentions of signing Belle, but he made sure Belle looked like the bad guy.
Absolutely. I should've put scare quotes around "can't keep".
That's a rational argument, but the casual fan just sees the Indians, yet again, losing a star because they won't pony up (not that it would've been a good baseball move). They're probably over it now, but the PR hit was pretty big.
Rational or not, the cynicism isn't going to go away until the team pays someone $100 million.
The Indians haven't been able to get middle of the pack attendance. So, yes, it would be a feat for them to do so.
But why now is the owner being held to the fire for not re-signing his own guys? Besides, it's not like he hasn't, they just have worked out terribly - Hafner, Westbrook. They couldn't re-sign Sabathia and Lee, and regardless of what snapper says, they couldn't re-sign them. Both were dead set on testing free agency, and there's no way a market like Cleveland can outbid bigger markets in that setting.
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