Attendance + Rivalries
 

I'm not quite sure how I'd suggest implementing this idea so if you have suggestions let me know!

How about incorporating rivalries into the game somehow? For example, if I'm the Chicago Cubs and the White Sox come into town, shouldn't attendance be higher?

I've been asking for this for years now.

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...rivalries.html

Rivalries would be cool. IIRC in the Football Manager editor you can set up a list of rival teams for each team, and a value of how strong the rivalry is. It would be cool to see something like that in OOTP.

This would be good, but I think you'd have to limit the amount of choices, say give the user up to 3 (or whatever #) teams they can set rivalries with. Otherwise, it will just become another exploitation tool for boosting attendance/revenue.

Attendance in general needs a revamping to better recreate the kind of patterns seen in real life. Day games versus night games, weekends versus week days, one opponent versus another, these are all part of the picture.

I can quickly cite an interesting example of the importance of a given opponent. In the early 1950s the Giants typically averaged roughly 10-11,000 or so for home games (I don't have the exact figures handy at the moment so I'm going by memory); but when the opponent was the Dodgers, attendance tripled. (This may well be one of the largest examples of an opponent-driven attendance boost in modern major league history.)

I hope to work on some attendance data studies later this year. (I'm currently at the moment tracking the minor league attendance for the 2013 season to see if there is a difference in the pattern of attendance between the majors and minors.)

me too- I asked this back around 11 or 12. Would love an increased attendance. Maybe even a bad blood rating thst might increase as players or hit or fights break out.

would love standing room only crowds in playoff games

I'd rather OOTP model the regular season/playoff attendance difference. While in the majors the playoffs are a bigger draw as compared to the regular season, in the minors that's often not the case. Indeed, sometimes the playoffs actually draw poorer on average than the regular season.

I would love it if they OOTP would reflect attendance issues that's even close to real life.

I have a league with ballparks ranging from 4,000 to 12,000 in size, with an average attendance of 1,400. Even so, shouldn't opening day be kind of a big deal, with sellouts or at least near sellouts? Instead, I see attendances ranging from 1,400 to 2,800.

Also, at the end of the season I had an awesome race to the wire for first place. The second place team is chasing the first place team and a win on the last day gets them a tie for the crown, and they're at home. They've should have completely sold out their 5,700 capacity ballpark. Instead, they draw a shade over 3,000. That's not right.

I don't see anything wrong with that. Your avg attendance is at 1400, you draw 3000 - that's more than dbl normal.

If it worked based on amount of seats, it would be easy to just go in and make all stadiums with a capacity of 100,000 plus and make a ton of $$$ from one game. I would have a much bigger problem with that, than with what you're saying is wrong.

when a team for example like Boston or Chicago cubs or even the Yankees you would expect them to sellout every game or a team that's a consistant playoff contender would also be selling out everygame and it does help with season ticketholders as well but the attendance in this game is only on those who show up rather than how many paid for the games

The wife and I attended a Wednesday day game in Seattle vs Jays this year. The attendance was 34,792. Just based on observing team colors around the stadium and in seats we concluded that BJ fans were about 40% of the crowd. My feeling was close to 50%. I was shocked that the figure was that high for a weekday daytime game. We were on vacation and obviously so were a lot of lower mainland people.:)

In Toronto Yankee and Red Sox fans regularly make up 20%-25% of attendance to weekend games.

It's closer to what Bluenoser says. Below are some stats I compiled based on Retrosheet's game log for the 1962 MLB season. Note that all attendance figures reported below are the league average for single admission games (i.e. day-night doubleheaders are counted as separate games—since a separate admission is charged for each—while regular doubleheaders are excluded).

Home openers on average overall drew 1.65 more fans than regular (Mon-Sun) single games.

By way of comparison, in 2012 home openers on average drew 1.42 times more fans than regular (Mon-Sun) single games. So from this (admittedly small sample) it would seem home openers tend to draw roughly as well compared to normal regular season games regardless of the time period.

As Bluenoser said, it would require some restrictions, but this would be a really, really cool feature to have.

I would point out that in regards to attendance it's not necessarily simply a case of a rival boosting attendance at a game. Some clubs are just better draws on the road than other opponents regardless of where they are playing. This was true of the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 1950s, for example.

I'd love to see this, and I think that a limit of about 3 would be right to prevent exploitation.

As my league stands at the moment, my own team would probably have one rival based on geographical proximity, one based on a historical rivalry between the two cities and another based on the two teams' shared history of play-off match-ups.

The first two would be unlikely to change as time went on, but the ability for me to edit them would mean I could change the third as such a rivalry may well fade some years after those play-off series, possibly to be replaced by another.

this would be awesome for my main fictional league as well. love the idea.

I don't think using 2012 as a basis for explaining lack of home openers drawing in the 19th or early 20th century is relevant. In 2012 the average team drew 71.4% of its stadium capacity throughout the entire season, so 1.42 * 71.4% = 101%, meaning home opener sellouts could not exceed 1.42 even if it wanted to.

1962 makes a touch more sense, although in this case, the issue of suburbanization in the face of the "threat" of the civil rights movement and the effect of urban decay unnaturally depressed attendance for all events located in central cities, where most stadia were located. The Cubs drew well under 10,000 in their opener that year, but that's partially because Wrigley Field was located in a decaying neighborhood where you could get your ass seriously kicked.

If we were to go back in time, I believe we see a much different picture, for the most part. Unfortunately, individual game attendance records were spotty, even for opening day, but total attendance records are complete and available on B-R. If we use the same comparison method you use for these years, for the teams whose home opener attendances we have available, we would see a much wider spread.

Here is 1908:

And this is 1929:

In 1908 the three openers all had way overflow crowds, and even thought that's not the same in 1929, the ratio of opener to average is still almost 3 as a mean, rather than 1.4 or 1.6.

Of course we can't have a 100,000 stadium capacity and fill that up on Opening Day everywhere, particularly in the 19th Century. That would be asinine. But I don't see any reason the best professional baseball team in a very large city could not sell out a 10,000 capacity stadium in a sport that's all the craze at the time. Not doing so makes no sense. That's all I'm saying, here.

If the league average is 1,400 then I'm inclined to think that this is about right - above league average, but not several times above. For me, a crowd 4-5 times the league average would be unrealistic.

Additionally, unless I have misunderstood how attendances are worked out there is a mathematical aspect to it in terms of the game. If OOTP is using the average figure specified in the settings to work out attendances, then crowds 4-5 times above the league average would surely have to have to lower the average for the rest of the season. How much of an impact would depend on the number of games in the season.

In real life it wouldn't have any impact at all, crowd figures would all be unrelated - but in OOTP I have always assumed that low crowds are needed somewhere to balance out the high ones and give the right overall average. If this is the case it would possibly influence attendances at the end of the season.

For that reason I try to keep average ballpark capacity higher than average attendance but not too much higher - so I can't have any disproportionately high crowds or stadiums which are 75%+ empty.

Even on Opening Day? Because as I've demonstrated with real data from that relative era, 4-5 times average, and higher, on Opening Day actually did occur. So I don't understand the problem.