MLB Has An Attendance Counting Problem

major league baseball teams are notoriously terrible at counting their home attendance figures look this is an issue that happens across Sports though Arena and Stadium attendance numbers they're all a bit wonky that's because a lot of it is simply guesswork now sometimes this is an educated guess and when a team is selling out or coming close to selling out being off by tens or even hundreds of fans it's not really that big of a deal or all that noticeable however when teams struggle to bring in fans well everyone needs to be in lock step as not to draw attention to what could be massive discrepancies if you have one team reporting a small crowd to be 3,000 people and another team with a similar size crowd reporting that to be 10,000 well you're going to raise a few eyebrows naturally MLB owners did not get that memo because some of the figures they are announcing for their Crowds Are down right shady I can only assume this is why the Oakland A's Miami Marlins and Chicago White Socks all have wildly different interpretations of what very few fans in their stadium look like seriously are you telling me this crowd is double the size of this crowd and this crowd is somewhere in the middle of those two figures they're the same picture for real though it's the same picture someone has just made up a different attendance figure for each one as I like to call it great Bratton keep it running when I was attending the University of Idaho go vandals I worked as a student employee in the sports information Department great experience loved my time there and it was during this time I learned the I suppose I could say Artistry of coming up with an attendance figure for a sports game the calculation is a guess it's an educated guest no doubt but a guess nonetheless in the case of my beloved Idaho vandals that meant we inflated the numbers sometimes to make things sound better that's just how the process went here's how everything goes down so the ticket off will tell you how many tickets they have sold to the game as well as how many walk-ups they are estimating how many they expect to receive you then take that number at some point during the game you look around at the crowd you see what exactly meshes with the number you get from the ticket office find a realistic figure juice up the numbers a bit to make it sound better and then you release the attendance figure oh I forgot the most important part of this process you make sure to add a random number in the 10 and one column to not make anything seem suspicious like if you announce an attendance as 3,100 people everyone will be questioning it they'll be like how did that happen that's not real but if you announce the same attendance as 3112 people well no one questions the number it's wild but it's true having since covered Sports as well as knowing those working inside team offices and journalists aware of the process I have come to understand some form of what I just described as used to calculate most attendance across the Sports World certainly there are franchises out there who really do their best to get the numbers as they come in and make sure what they're announcing as attendance is at least as close to realistic as they can possibly get at that moment in time colleges well colleges are the Wild West in terms of announced attendance in that regard major league baseball teams operate far closer to college teams than some of their counterparts in the professional sports realm when it comes to calculating attendance for any game I think the biggest challenge you run into is that there are a lot of different data points you need to bring together you have all of these numbers coming from various sources and getting everything organized at some point during the game itself it just unrealistic too many people have too many things on their plate to also add up how many people are in the stadium by the way doing this was unrealistic when you had ticket takers with their clicker thing trying to count the number of people it's unrealistic with the technology available even to this day the process it doesn't work in real time as a game is being played to that end during the early 2000s you saw a lot of media Outlets simply stop reporting on attendance numbers because they knew these numbers were just bogus they were basically made up the attendance numbers announced by teams were basically as meaningful as points on any given episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway that's right the points are like most of the movies that began as Saturday Night Live sketches in order to understand just why announced attendance of major League Baseball doesn't really matter let's look at the different types of sports attendance and how they impact the eventual number that does get released you have paid attendance or the number of people who have actually paid for a ticket to see any given sporting event then you have ticketed attendance what includes comp tickets discounts giveaways all of that stuff basically the number of any person you think has a ticket in hand or a ticket that's been given away we do know that this number doesn't stop being count just because a game begins in fact sales can extend beyond the completion of a game we know that full and well because the Miami Marlins went on to purchase a ton of tickets for Roy holiday's perfect game in Miami all those years back and they did so well after the game had been finished because they wanted to sell them on as souvenirs most people associate announced attendance with butts in the seats how many people are at the game in reality though butts in the seats is a number that's almost never used even then there are two drop backs to the butts and the seats number first teams will just include anyone in the venue as part of the actual attendance number second anyone who's ever used digital ticket scanners e tickets whatever you want to call that system well you know full and well just how faulty it is I've been waved into multiple games because the scanner just wasn't working properly so using this to rely on a butts in the seats number well I mean do so at your own risk that brings us to announced attendance or the number most of us will be familiar with it is a hybrid of all of those other types of attendance I just mentioned but it's also sort of its own thing completely interestingly the national league announced Turn Style numbers for their attendance through 1992 these days though baseball teams have been given free license to say produce put out any attendance number they so choose that's a bit different from the NBA and NHL which claims to use distributed ticket numbers and the NFL who wants team to announce tickets sold but there's no policy in place for them to do so regardless it does not take a Sherlock Holmes or even An Inspector Gadget to take one look at a poorly attended sporting contest and in particular baseball games look at the attendance see how many people's there and realize something doesn't necessarily add up literally for baseball the Oakland A Chicago White Soxs and Miami Marlins have been drawn roughly the same number of people to most home games in 2024 the announced attendance num for each of these teams though tells a different story it's really supporting a narrative each franchise wants you to believe the Athletics have seemingly been trying to Champion there Oakland doesn't care about us cause for years now despite doing a bunch of terrible things to make sure fans did not want to go two games that has meant the Oakland A are just about the only losing team in America to release what are probably realistic Turn Style numbers not including staff players and the lik for their announced attendance total they want that number to be as low as possible then you have the Marlins who are trying to make it seem like more people are at Lone Depot Park than they're really are and they've been doing this for more than a decade now this year that team's situation is so bad the attendance numbers are so terrible that even the fake numbers are sagging and declining let's talk about Jerry reinsdorf and his Chicago White Socks they have looked to Pivot from pastures then their attendance figures look to be grossly inflated if we're being being honest here now though it seems like they want to bring those down because as we all know Jerry reinsdorf is either looking to get a new Stadium built or to Flatout relocate the team in order to do so got to get those numbers down down down much like John fiser the White Sox owner's goal in 2024 is so clear he wants to make it seem like no one cares about the baseball team and low attendance figures are just one part of that story of course the White Sox and Jerry Rin dorf can't go all in on cratering those tendance numbers just yet I imagine they have sponsors for guaranteed raate field and all of that other stuff and popping out a 3,000 number well that will definitely scare them away but you don't need 2020 Vision to see that Guaranteed Rate field and the Oakland Coliseum are drawing basically the same number of fans most nights everyone wants to focus on MLB they have an attendance problem and I mean that's true to a certain extent but what about the MLB announced attendance problem this is just a big deal as the actual attendance problem teams are now just announcing attendance figures based on the story they want to sell the general public what they want folks to believe rather that be good or bad what I don't understand I didn't understand it back at Idaho and I don't understand it today is why must attendance figures be announced during the game we know the accuracy of doing so is questionable at best let's just take the time to add everything up compile all the different categories comp tickets pay tickets butts in the seats all the other numbers and then once a month just release them to the public not only does this eliminate the guest work and just some of the dubious tactics of certain franchises but it gives everyone just a better understanding of what attendance is rather that be in person like I said butts in the seats or just tickets sold we will have the large holistic picture of attendance that anyone can use to make an informed decision of course sports teams they probably don't want to do this you know heaven forbid we as fans know the truth about attendance instead we continue to let sports teams and in particular Major League Baseball franchises cook the books as far as how many people are at each game why though for what because we must have an announced attendance during the game we are at if you're looking to pop the crowd just run another hidden ball hat game or show another dot race why do we need to have the announced attendance during the game seriously just get out of here with that either do the attendance truthfully take your time to get it right or do not do it at all and the announced attendance for this video is 8,732 1119 like I said make sure the tens in the ones column have a random digit in it anyway thank you for watching this video if you'd like to learn a little bit more about stadiums that were outdated before they were even completed video lower right hand corner corner of your screen is the place to go in the upper right hand corner of the screen why I love old outdated stadiums like the Oakland Coliseum until next time I'm cheyen Hollis this is the Touchback and as always hasht take it out to the 25