Hello, Fire Brand readers. I’m Andrew Lipsett – you may remember me from such Fire Brand articles as ‘The One Where I Defend Manny’ and ‘The One Where I Got Every Stathead In The Country Mad At Me For Saying Damon Wasn’t Going To Be Good By 2007’ (now subtitled ‘I Told You So’). I left Fire Brand at the end of last season so I could focus on failing to write for my own blog, 12eight. Go ahead, click on it. You know you want to.
To preface this article: I have no idea if any of the following is going to be interesting to anyone except me. There are charts involved, and there’s no really clear point, other than a pretty strong ‘huh’ factor. On the plus side, you can call me a nerd in the comments, so it balances out.
When Evan asked me to step in for a guest column today, I already had an idea in mind: I was going to do a little retrospective on the Duquette era, with the basic premise that Duquette was really responsible, more than any other, for the current Red Sox Nation craze. I still believe that to be true, but it’s not what I’m actually going to be discussing today. While doing my research, I wound up taking a deep look into something that really isn’t discussed a lot: Fenway Park attendance numbers. One of the great things about Fenway is that, given its age, we have a fairly unique ability to look at the franchise’s entire history (almost) through ballpark attendance. What I wanted to look at was how the acquisitions Duquette made between 1997 and 1998 increased franchise popularity to levels it had never before seen; one facet of that was going to be a function of an attendance/ballpark capacity ratio. What I wound up with was a historical database of attendance that includes things like league attendance rank, ownership, seasonal attendance, and ballpark capacity that lets me make a few interesting statements about the whole of Red Sox – and, in some ways, baseball – history. If you want to play along at home, here’s a link to the full spreadsheet.
To start us off, here’s a chart of Fenway Park attendance between 1912 and 2006 (click on it to expand).
It’s more or less an obvious upward trend; there are some peaks (right after the 1946 season, during and after the 1967 and 1986 seasons) and one big valley (the early 60’s). Those two downward spikes to the right of the chart are baseball’s two player strikes in 1981 and 1994.
Those last two show why it’s difficult to judge a team’s popularity based solely on attendance numbers: they fluctuate based on, among other things, winning percentage, ballpark capacity, and number of games played. That’s why I took this a step further, and calculated each season’s total Fenway capacity – basically, number of seats multiplied by number of home games. When you combine those numbers with the actual attendance figures, the chart to the right is what you get. That can also be viewed as a straight percentage of attendance to capacity (second chart).
A few things are interesting about these. The first thing that comes to mind is a question: What the heck were baseball owners thinking building stadiums with capacities of nearly 30,000 when the Red Sox, baseball’s biggest draw in the 1910’s, could only fill – in their biggest season during that span – 28% of the park? The Red Sox didn’t approach a seasonal average of 27,000 – Fenway’s original capacity – until the late 1960’s, and didn’t exceed it until the late 1970’s. Now, a simple answer is that the attendance data we have is woefully wrong, and that’s a legitimate possibility. The other, of course, is that stadiums were built for maximum capacity; we know Fenway was filled during most of the early century World Series games. Still, it’s interesting to think about a team that won nearly half of the WS’s played during that decade may have never scratched 30% capacity.
Second, take a look at the far end there. To return for a second to my original premise, it’s amazing how the Sox have gone from a popular club to a legitimate phenomenon over the last few years; with an attendance approaching 100% of capacity for the last 3 seasons, it’s easy to give credit to the new ownership group, and a ton of that credit is deserved. But reserve some as well for Dan Duquette, who took over the club in 1994 after two dismal seasons, and made it one of baseball’s most competitive teams. Between 1994 and 2001, the Sox had three playoff appearances, a homegrown star, the greatest pitcher anyone’s ever seen, and an attendance figure that rose sharply, from 81% of capacity in Duquette’s first season to 96% in his final one.
Another thing that jumps out is the obvious relationship between winning and attendance. Sox fans love to hold the term ‘bandwagon’ over Yankee fans, and without doing my own Yankee attendance chart I can’t really dispute that, but it’s interesting to note that Sox fans have had, over their history, a fairly bandwagon approach. Look at the biggest spikes: They correspond to 1946 (31.2% difference), 1967 (33.8% difference) 1975-1978 (26.2% difference) and 1986-1988 (24.9% difference). I think you can probably see the common trend here. Furthermore, the biggest dips – especially that one from the mid-50’s to the mid-60’s but also that valley between 1919 and 1934 – represent some of the worst Sox teams of all time; you can see this also in the early 80’s and early-mid 90’s.
The relationship between winning and attendance can be seen very clearly in this chart (last one, I promise), which shows the Sox’ rank within the league in winning% alongside the Sox’ rank within the league in attendance.
Maybe not the easiest chart in the world to read, but there’s an incredibly clear correlation there. When the Sox win, fans show up. When they don’t… we don’t. What’s even more interesting is how perfectly, for the most part, attendance rank and league-finish rank go hand in hand; I’d imagine that if I did a chart like this for every other team in the majors, it would look the same. We’re all bandwagon fans to one degree or another.
Another fun thing this has allowed me to do is to look at the years of greatest change, and match them to the cause. The five years that saw the biggest increase from the season before are:
1967 – Pretty obvious cause there – a pennant season out of nowhere after a decade of, at best, mediocrity.
1946 – See above, more or less, but also add in that the ’46 season was the first full one after the end of World War II, which did to baseball what it did to the rest of the world.
1986 – Another seemingly-out-of-nowhere pennant winner, with a fairly exciting young core of players that were just coming into their own.
1934 – The Sox finished in the middle of the pack in the AL, but their attendance shot up due to one thing: after a decade of mismanagement and poor finances, Thomas Yawkey bought the club and began to spend. Fenway’s capacity rose to 34,000, and the Sox began to acquire better and better players.
1982 – No reason other than this: 1981 had been interrupted by a player strike, which caused major losses in per game attendance for the Sox. ’82 was less an upward spike than it was the correction of a downward one.
And, in case you were wondering about the flipside, here are the years where attendance declined most precipitously:
1980 – I can’t really explain this one. It was the first year after the end of the great late 70’s run, wherein the Sox finished worse than 3rd in the AL for the first time in a few years, but that really doesn’t seem to completely explain it. It was Fisk and Lynn’s final season, but that would only explain a dip in 1981. So, I dunno. Anyone have any ideas?
1943 – This one is far more obvious. Not only did the Sox come down from two straight second-place finishes in 1941 and 1942, but this was also the year Ted Williams went off to war; Williams missed the 1943, 1944, and 1945 seasons.
1961 – The Sox were terrible, of course, but they’d been terrible the year before as well. The best explanation here also has to do with the absence of Ted: Williams retired after the 1960 season.
1981 – As if the season-dividing strike wasn’t bad enough, the Sox essentially kicked Carlton Fisk out of town, and Fred Lynn followed him, putting a pretty definitive end to the late-70’s club. The combination of those factors made it a rough year attendance-wise, for the second straight year in a row (1980 and 1981 represent the single largest two year drop in Sox history, by a wide margin).
So, there you go. No big revelation or anything, just a bunch of interesting numbers. I think looking at these in-depth can tell you a fair amount about Sox history, and give us a little perspective on our club and ourselves as fans. Obviously baseball isn’t the only factor here; to really analyze these numbers, you’d need similar datasets from every older team, you’d need to correlate with population figures and urbanization statistics, you’d need to examine socio-economic and political factors. And that would be way too long to do for free. So, in the meantime, you get this. Make of it what you will.
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