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June 18, 2003

Lies, Damned Lies

Bounces

by Nate Silver

Baseball is full of bounces, and not just the path of a Jacque Jones double as it skips across the Metrodome turf (or a Carlos Martinez homer as it skips off Jose Canseco's head). Rather, teams can expect a bounce in attendance when they move into a new facility, facilitating a higher payroll, a more competitive club, and ultimately, it is hoped, a couple of pennants to hang on the outfield wall.

Or at least, once upon a time, they could have. The standing-room-only precedent established in places like Toronto and Baltimore and Cleveland no longer seems to hold. Attendance in Detroit, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh has already regressed to the levels those teams had grown accustomed to prior to the opening of their new stadiums. Attendance in Cincinnati is up, but only barely--and this with reasonable ticket prices and a fun team on the field. Nobody expects the honeymoon to last forever, but the reinvigorated relationships between ballpark and city that the new stadiums were supposed to engender have lasted shorter than a Liz Taylor nuptial.

Since the debut of SkyDome in 1989, 13 of the 26 teams in existence at that time have opened new parks. Two more will open new facilities next year. It has been the longest sustained period of new stadium construction in baseball history. Call them mallparks or, as I prefer, Retroplexes. Either way, there's plenty of evidence that the ball isn't bouncing quite as highly these days.

A quick estimate of the gain in attendance that each new park provided can be determined as follows:

1. Calculate the average per-game attendance in the six years prior to the opening of the new park, excluding the season immediately preceding the opening of the new park. This is done to eliminate the "bachelor party" effect in which an old park receives a nostalgia-inspired boost in attendance in its final year of existence, as was observed in Detroit and Chicago. So, for example, the baseline attendance for Jacobs Field, which opened in 1994, is calculated from the years 1988-1992, with 1993 thrown out. (In the case of Seattle and Toronto, which opened their parks in mid-season, we tossed out the split year instead.)

2. Compare this to the average attendance during the first three years of the new park, when the novelty should be at its highest.

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