The Angels are a team coming off of a 98-win season with the best and most exciting young player in the world on the roster along with a future first tier Hall of Famer and burgeoning, homegrown ace. Naturally, nobody wants to watch that team.
Wait, what?
Yep, the Angels attendance is in the crapper. They are thus far suffering the third largest decline in per game attendance (a decline of approximately 5,400 per game) trailing only a Texas Rangers team being forced to rebuild due to a rash of devastating injuries and the Atlanta Braves, who have one foot out the door as they wait for their new stadium and one middle finger extended in the air after they gutted their roster for a rebuild once that stadium deal got finalized. How in the world did the Angels get lumped in with those two?
The Angels have boasted how their attendance has been so strong ever since they won the World Series, topping the 3 million mark every year since 2003. That’s impressive, but the focus on that 3 million mark is a bit of a canard. Over the last three seasons, the Angels have only just barely cleared 3 million, including 2013 when their attendance total was 3,019,505. their lowest since 2002. Now the Halos have dug themselves an 97,000+ attendance hole.
Had the Angels attendance fallen off a few hundred per game it wouldn’t have been a big surprise, especially with them coming slow out of the gate… again. But this massive decline is pretty shocking, especially given that there were high expectations entering the season. So what the hell is going on?
One theory is simply that the Angels aren’t winning right now and thus the fans aren’t coming. That’s a pretty simple explanation that makes some sense, but it doesn’t explain why the success from 2014 didn’t carry over at all. If the losing is driving away fans, they all bailed pretty quickly.
It is possible that fans are just being skeptical. As any Angels fan knows all too well, the Halos have a history of coming out of the gate slowly, even when they were really good last season. So maybe it isn’t that fans are abandoning the team so much as waiting for the team to prove that they deserve to be watched.
That effect could only be exacerbated by the fact that the Angels had a pretty quiet offseason. They made no real big moves other than trading away Howie Kendrick. While the 98-win season was great, the ALDS loss was not and it left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. If casual fans then see the Halos deal away a fan favorite and acquire nothing but prospects and a DH they’ve never heard of, you can’t really blame them if they weren’t really excited for the season.
Another factor to consider is the competition. The Angels have thus far hosted the entire AL West, the Royals and one game of the Rockies. These teams aren’t exactly big draws at the gate. Last year’s Angels during the same part of the season had the Mets and Yankees come to Anaheim. Still, the 2014 team was drawing better crowds when the same AL West teams came to visit, so that’s only a partial explanation.
Maybe the other competition is a contributing to the decline. By that I mean the other sports in town, the Ducks and, to a lesser extent, the Clippers. Both teams are making deep playoff runs and competing for a lot of the same eyeballs and dollars that normally come to the Angels. A lot of those games overlap with Angels home games, so there are certainly some would-be Angels fans who either decided to go across the street to the Ponda, up the freeway to Staples or chose to stay home instead to watch the playoff game from there.
What worries me is that maybe these attendance dips are self-inflicted by Angels management. They’ve been doing these weird 4:05 PM start times for years and it doesn’t seem like they’ve ever caught on. In fact, their lowest attended game in year came on a 4:05 PM home game this year. They’ve also made some bold changes in their ticket pricing policies. There is the dynamic ticket pricing that is supposed adjust price to demand. The keyword there is “supposed to.” It is entirely possible that the Angels suck at picking the appropriate pricing and have thus priced some fans out. In a similar vein, the Angels have taken over the secondary market for their tickets and force season ticket holders to do their re-sale via Ticketmaster. One can’t help but wonder if that put a small dent in their season ticket sales which have already taken big hits over the last few years.
Maybe I’m just overthinking it. Maybe the Angels have simply created too much negative PR for themselves. The Josh Hamilton saga was divisive and could have turned some people off. The ongoing lack of stadium negotiations and flirtation with Tustin and Irvine could be keeping Anaheim loyalists from supporting a team they think is going to move in the next few years.
Honestly, it is probably a little bit of all those things mentioned above, but whatever the driving forces are, this is a growing concern. The Angels have their fat TV contract to keep them afloat for the next two decades, but if attendance continues to drop off, it could affect Arte Moreno’s willingness to spend and possibly even his willingness to keep the team in the Big A.
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