Fans like gimmicks,
Bobbleheads aside, rebuilding attendance starts with energizing ballpark experience
CLEVELAND—“Just a reminder fans, comin’ up is our Die-hard Night here at the stadium. Free admission to anyone who was actually alive the last time the Indians won a pennant.”
Sardonic play-by-play man Harry Doyle, played by Bob Uecker in the 1989 classic baseball comedy Major League, was not much of a marketer. But he understood the challenges faced by all non-winning teams to put butts in seats.
Outside of baseball’s big-market cities — New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago — major-league ballclubs are constantly searching for new ways to fill their stadiums 81 times each year.
Chia pet giveaways, a free Ludacris concert, all-you-can-eat hotdogs — teams will try almost anything.
But does any of it work? Can you really draw crowds without a winning team to root for?
“Winning is clearly the single biggest and most meaningful lever, and I don’t think you will ever replace winning as the single biggest mechanism to drive attendance,” says Cleveland Indians president Mark Shapiro, a two-time major league executive of the year.
But most teams don’t win, and with baseball’s exclusive playoff club — even with the added wild cards, only one-third of teams will make the post-season — many clubs are doomed by mid-summer. So, Shapiro says, you do what you can to “soften valleys and heighten peaks” in an attempt to insulate ticket revenue from the fluctuations of the on-field performance.
While bobbleheads remain a dependable draw — some clubs say bobblehead nights guarantee an attendance boost of 5,000 — baseball front offices are turning away from giveaways and discounted tickets, focusing their efforts instead on building a long-term attachment with fans and improving the overall ballpark experience.
Last season the Jays’ average game attendance was 22,445, sixth-lowest in the league and 281 fewer than Cleveland, a city half the size of Hamilton.
Once holders of baseball’s attendance record, the Jays have struggled to rebuild their fan base in the wake of the 1994-95 strike and the 17 playoff-less seasons that followed. Where they once stood with New York and L.A. in terms of ticket sales, they now slum it with the Baltimores, Oaklands and Tampa Bays of the baseball world.
General manager Alex Anthopoulos created something of a fan firestorm this off-season when he suggested the team would only go after big-name free agents when the team sold more tickets.
Team president Paul Beeston clarified Anthopoulos’s comments last month in an interview with Sports-