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| Just another Tuesday night at MMP. Does it have to be? |
The Phillies are averaging a reported 24,472 fans per game this season.
The Houston Astros are fielding the second-best team in baseball, trailing only the team reportedly facing criminal charges for breaching Houston's baseball operations database. They have a talented young core of players that doubles as a corporate marketer's dream of multiculturalism and personality. They have been on the cover of Sports Illustrated and chronicled by the hardcore national baseball media for the past two years. If you gave every educated fan in America their choice of talent to put in their hometown uniforms for the next half-decade, the Astros are unquestionably top five and possibly the first choice.
The Astros are averaging a reported 24,489 fans per game this season.
(Yes, most teams fudge and inflate these numbers. As a partial-package season ticket holder, I can tell you the Astros are as guilty as anyone.)
So what's going on here? How can it be that baseball's most exciting and promising team and its most depressing and adrift franchise are drawing the same number of fans?
We'll circle back to the Phillies later. I could just as easily have cited the last place Red Sox, an unlikable collection of players that is largely hate-watched by local fans (their owner literally called the team "painful to watch"), and also a team that happens to draw 10,500 more fans per game than the Astros do. For now, let's focus on Houston.
The Astros currently rank 24th in baseball in attendance despite having the 9th largest potential fan base by market size (note: these estimates are from 2009 U.S. Census data, and the Houston market is almost certainly bigger than the Philadelphia market by 2015 based on population trends). Here is a look at the 10 franchises who enjoy the most populated markets in Major League Baseball, the ones you might consider the definition of big-market teams:
| MLB rank | U.S. rank | Metropolitan area | Team name | Team home area | Metro size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | New York metropolitan area | Yankees | Bronx, New York City | 19,069,796 |
| 1 | 1 | New York metropolitan area | Mets | Queens, New York City | 19,069,796 |
| 2 | 2 | Los Angeles metropolitan area | Angels | Anaheim, California | 12,874,797 |
| 2 | 2 | Los Angeles metropolitan area | Dodgers | Los Angeles, California | 12,874,797 |
| 3 | 3 | Chicago metropolitan area | Cubs | Chicago, Illinois | 9,580,567 |
| 3 | 3 | Chicago metropolitan area | White Sox | Chicago, Illinois | 9,580,567 |
| 4 | 4 | Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area | Rangers | Arlington, Texas | 6,447,615 |
| 5 | 5 | Delaware Valley | Phillies | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | 5,968,252 |
| 6 | 6 | Greater Houston | Astros | Houston, Texas | 5,867,489 |
| 7 | — | Greater Toronto Area | Blue Jays | Toronto, Ontario | 5,623,500 |
Six of the eight teams in front of the Astros are from two-team markets (New York, Los Angeles and Chicago). If you elect to split those markets in half to assign each team a market share, the Astros leap over the Chicago teams and have the seventh largest market in MLB, trailing only the Yankees, Angels and Rangers in the American League.
The Astros, though, were dead last in MLB in 2014 in revenue, and had the lowest Opening Day payroll in 2015. A lot of that can be fairly blamed on a disastrous television deal they only recently escaped with Comcast (let's face it: many of us can sympathize with someone who is trying to break free from Comcast's clutches). But long before CSN Houston came and went, the Astros were thought of by most fans as a small-to-mid market team. This perception is backed up by the fact that, despite similar market sizes, the Rangers and Phillies have handed out several nine-figure contracts, and the Astros have only made one sizable free agent outlay this century, an ill-advised 2007 deal with Carlos Lee (6 years, $100M) to captain their descent. Lee's deal was negotiated by former GM Tim Purpura, who was fired during the first season of the contract.
Jim Crane does not appear to be a #JustWinBaby Al Davis clone, paying no mind to payroll and giving his GM a blank check. But it would also be unfair to conclude he is a revenue hoarder who only sees true victory on a spreadsheet. The Astros were (understandably) bad on purpose for the first three years of his stewardship, and there is no evidence that the fan base is suddenly supporting the team in numbers that would beg for an immediate spending spree. The jury is still out on Crane's wallet.
So let's look at the issue of fan support. Are the Astros doomed by their fan base to be, like Oakland and Tampa Bay, a team that can only compete by exploiting a constantly evolving set of market inefficiencies, while Texas, Anaheim and Seattle throw endless piles of money at their problems every time the farm system goes through a down cycle? In other words, is Houston simply not a baseball town?
Since moving to Texas from New England last summer, I have tried to do my homework on Houston baseball, and also discussed the issue of fan support with fans, both in person at Minute Maid Park and on Twitter. The sentiments can be broken down into a few general lines of reasoning, each worth looking at in more detail. I want to start with some of the more specific, partial explanations, then build to some of the broader concerns:
1. "Houston traffic, man. Getting here is a chore." (Traffic)
This is the most oft-cited reason for their woes by Tampa Bay Rays fans, whose team usually ranks dead last in MLB in attendance, despite having been highly competitive for the past eight seasons. The Rays issues, (detailed well here), boil down to a ballpark that is on a bit of an island relative to traffic flow and public transit, and thus takes far too long to get to, even if you live relatively close to the stadium.
TomTom and Forbes put together a massive Traffic Congestion Index each year. Houston is currently ranked 12th among the most congested cities in America, behind the home cities of the Dodgers, Angels, Giants, Yankees, Mets, Mariners, Marlins, Cubs, White Sox, Nationals and Rays. We're middle of the pack. Now, to be fair, our evening congestion rates are higher than morning, putting us around 6th for PM-only, which is relevant to baseball games. So there is some merit to the idea it is somewhat difficult to get to the ballpark. (Part of this owes to the fact Houston is one of the last major American cities whose middle class refuses to use and support public transportation, but that is a discussion for another blog.)
Personally, we lived in The Woodlands our first year down here, and my wife and I now live inside the loop in Bellaire. The commute to an Astros game was about 55-70 minutes on average from The Woodlands, and about 20-45 minutes (it varies widely) now. This is not unreasonable, especially when you factor in the parking situation.
As far as parking goes, let me be clear: us Houston fans have a great deal. I take advantage of the non-parallel metered parking available all around the stadium (in my case, I usually park on Commerce and La Branch, a whopping three blocks from the gate). The meters are shut off at 6 PM so parking is always free on weeknights. In Boston, good luck going to any of the 81 home dates and getting free or under-$15 parking within walking distance of the ballpark. The last game I went to before moving down here, a September 2013 Orioles/Red Sox Wednesday night affair, cost me $35 to park. And it could have been worse. At Minute Maid, you park your car near the stadium for free and stroll in like you're going to a friggin' doctor's appointment on a Tuesday morning. It's wonderful. End of parking discussion.
So overall, the traffic coming in is probably slightly worse than in the average market, though that depends largely on where you're coming from. Minute Maid is centrally located and has easy access to and from games -- the time saved getting home from games should be factored in, and MMP is very convenient in this regard due to the large number of loop options in the immediate vicinity. Also, parking is a breeze.
I am not discounting the impact that traffic can have for some fans, especially logistically after work, or for those in the suburbs with kids (we'll talk about the suburban fan more later). But those dilemmas are universal to attending professional sporting events, which tend to be located in major urban centers. It's an apples to apples comparison with most of the other markets that are far exceeding the Astros attendance figures, and so I'm inclined to see nothing egregious in the Houston traffic situation to pin blame on.
2. "No one has good attendance on weeknights." (Weeknight Games)
Earlier this year, Michael Lortz of Fangraphs presented a tremendous little piece you should read in full on the data behind a fairly common sense theory: the more fans you have who live close (within 30 minutes) to your ballpark, the less gap you will see between weeknight and weekend attendance. The dad on the cul de sac an hour away with a baseball-crazy seven-year old would love to bring him to the ballpark for $1 hot dog night on a Wednesday. But he gets home from work too late to boomerang back into the city with little Johnny America, and wouldn't be back home before 11 or 11:30. School night or summer night, that's late to have a young kid on your hands in public.
So what did Lortz find? Well, the correlation exists, and the Astros fit it. But here's the thing: the Astros have a larger than average fan base within 30 minutes, and their weeknight/weekend split backs that up, by showing less drop off during the week than the average franchise. Which is to say: Astros attendance sucks all the time, but relative to the league, it actually sucks more on the weekend.
3. "When the team builds trust, and fans see it's turning around, they'll show, man." (Fans Come When We Win)
Sort of. The 2005 Astros went to the World Series. They were coming off a successful 2004 season, having made it to Game 7 of the NLCS. There was no surprise factor to delay the attendance spike. That 2005 team finished 7th in the National League in attendance. You have to go back to the 1970s to find a year in which they finished higher than 5th. Some of this has to do with ballpark capacity -- Minute Maid fits just shy of 41,000 people, and they were averaging in the mid-upper 30s during the good years, within shouting distance. Still, there seemed to be a clear cap on attendance potential, and it was not a sellout.
This was also true on the Bagwell/Biggio Astrodome teams of the late 1990s, repeat division champions in a large capacity (though dreary) stadium. Larry Dierker's squads could never draw above 33,000 fans in a season.
4. "Who wants to watch baseball, man? I mean, that sport... hold on bro, I gotta check out this Vine on my phone a few more times" (Baseball is Dying)
Baseball is, by the bottom line numbers, absolutely not dying. MLB made $9 billion in revenue last year, closer to the #1 sport (NFL football at $11 billion) than the #3 sport (the trendy NBA at "just" $5.5 billion). Baseball is doing fine. Really well, actually.
A lot of this has to do with TV money. As has been discovered by any sports fan with even a casual familiarity with television contracts, live sports are extremely valuable content in a time when people DVR their favorite episodic television shows and skip the commercials on playback. The sports viewing experience requires real-time engagement, lest you learn of the outcome from ESPN or a buddy's text message before getting to watch it. And so, teams are raking in money for the 500 hours of live sports programming the local team's baseball season provides.
Attendance numbers, overall, back this up. Exactly half the league is up, and half is down. The overall numbers are plus-398,755 paying customers through July 4th. The Astros sport the seventh-largest increase, about 1,700 fans per game more than they were drawing in 2014.
The sport is extremely profitable and selling tickets at a healthy and increasing rate. So it's not dying.
But we need to dig into these numbers a bit more. Because who is watching baseball will tell us more than how many people are watching, especially as it relates to Houston itself.
5. "Nobody I know likes baseball, except my dad. It's for boring old white people." (Demographics)
Comedian Chris Rock, in a memorable commentary on HBO (caution: explicit) shared his thoughts on why baseball has fallen out of favor with African Americans. He noted that the rosters of both National League finalists last year, including eventual World Series champion San Francisco, did not include a single black player.
The University of Central Florida's 2015 Racial and Gender Report Card on Major League Baseball backs Rock up, at least partially. On the field, the players are only 8% black. However, this is not because they are becoming any more white: the current percentage of players who are white is 58.8%, which has been remarkably steady, holding within a range of 58%-63% for the past 21 years. The increase, as many readers may have already guessed, comes from Hispanic players, who now make up 29.3% of MLB players.
The 2015 Astros closely reflect this diversity. Their current 40-man roster is 55% white, 30% Hispanic, 12.5% black and 2.5% Asian. (Note: I am counting George Springer, who is biracial, as an African-American.)
What does that really tell us, though? Rock's underlying assertion is that the race or ethnicity of a sport's players has a strong correlation to fan interest among those of the same race or ethnicity. To an extent, perhaps. We like to feel a connection to the celebrities we admire. But if I found out a bunch of skinny white guys from New England were playing for the Dynamo, it wouldn't make me go out to buy tickets. This is entirely because I do not find soccer to be entertaining. Along those lines, I have no problem rooting enthusiastically for Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa, Chris Carter and Colby Rasmus, all of whom come from cultural backgrounds and upbringings that have very little in common with my own. I do this because I find the sport they play to be highly entertaining.
Demographics, however, are not useless. Quite the opposite: I actually think they're essential to diagnosing Houston's baseball attendance woes. We know that certain ages, races, genders and socioeconomic backgrounds absolutely do show a preference for certain sports. Whether or not this correlates to the same demographics among the athletes themselves is not the point.
Baseball's audience is older and whiter than any other major sport's, which is why we see new commissioner Rob Manfred working to speed up the game through a variety of piecemeal policies. The rationale is not that 17-year olds will sit down and give their undivided attention to a three-hour telecast of a non-contact sport as long as it's marketed to them. It's that a younger generation of fans can get hooked on the sport in bite-size chunks that fit their multi-tasking brains, via the wonderful MLB AtBat app, highlights and occasionally catching stretches of local games. Then, when they get older (and wealthier) and their need for sensory overload is slowly replaced by an emerging desire to have everyone around them STFU, they will ease into long-form baseball consumption.
Let's take what we know and get back to where this started: comparing Houston and Philadelphia, two baseball markets drawing identical numbers of fans despite one putting out an extremely entertaining, successful product and one putting out laughable garbage.
Which city is whiter? Philadelphia, 36.2% to 25.8%. In addition, it also has far fewer commuters, with only a net population increase of 5% during the day due to commuting (Houston's workday population spikes over 20%). Philly's potential fan base of affluent, 9-to-5 workers are more likely to live inside city limits.
When it comes to the Astros, it's a fairly simple question: can a top-10 market that is only one-quarter white sustain a team in the whitest major sport in America that functions as a big market franchise?
Reid Ryan had some telling comments to Evan Drellich of the Chronicle last month when the Astros announced Tal's Hill was coming down:
If you look around at our facility, we don’t have a spot really where millenials, young professionals can come and gather. Where they want to see the game. You’ve been to all the games (elsewhere), you’ve seen it, they have one... where they can set food, where they can visit... It’s really the next evolution of Minute Maid Park. The demographics of baseball have changed over the years, and people demand more out of their experience when they come to the stadium.What Ryan is saying, quite directly, is that the Astros are taking out Tal's Hill in order to grow their revenue by targeting the young professionals and millenials of Houston. That is an audience that is primarily white, though not exclusively. It's people like myself, frankly. Late 20s transplants from other parts of the country who found work in Houston. The generation is very social and communal, and doesn't like the idea of being strapped to a chair for three hours, but do not necessarily have the means yet to afford luxury boxes behind home plate. Soon, they can walk around chatting with their friends while staring at Jake Marisnick's backside at field level all night. Worth a shot.
In my judgment, Ryan is on the right track. The Astros need a mix of affordable seating for some of Houston's minority residents, with an aggressive Spanish-language advertising campaign building around Carlos Correa and Jose Altuve. That seems obvious. But whether there is the disposable income and underlying love of baseball in that community is less certain. So Ryan is doing the best he can to attract Houston's young white professionals, who exist in smaller numbers than they do in Boston and Philadelphia, but are very much still there.
And what of the suburbanites? Ultimately, Houston has already done all they can for that demo. The park is centrally located for access from all directions. In 15-20 years, when it comes time to replace Minute Maid, perhaps moving to the suburbs will be a reasonable alternative, as the Braves ultimately opted to do. But Houston's affluent suburban population is so evenly distributed geographically that putting a ballpark, say, on The Woodlands Waterway, would make the commute that much harder for fans in Pasadena, Katy, Friendswood, etc.
The area around Minute Maid also desperately needs urban modernization. I was struck by how dilapidated the area looked, especially compared to other neighborhoods in Houston. I am not familiar enough with the economic realities of city planning to know how you structure a young professional-friendly business climate around a baseball stadium where no such culture currently exists, but having walk-up fans and a festive atmosphere would be a huge boon for the ball club.
For now, as the Astros attempt to build a winner on baseball's smallest payroll, trying to re-create that environment in Jake Marisnick's literal shadow will have to do.
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