The Twins today open one of their longer homestands of the year (nine games in 10 days). They do so with Justin Morneau no longer on the team and Joe Mauer on the shelf indefinitely.
September is generally a rough month for also-rans in terms of actual attendance, by which I mean bodies in the seats as opposed to tickets sold. School's back in session, the evenings start getting chillier. And in the case of the also-ran 2013 Twins, the two biggest names aren't there.
It is true that neither the Twins nor this weekend's visitors, the Toronto Blue Jays, will reach the postseason; it is also true that Toronto's biggest star, Jose Bautista, is out for the season. Still, I reject the cliche of "nothing to play for" and "meaningless games." The Minnesota lineups this weekend figure to be filled with unfamiliar names, but the novices and newcomers are playing, in a sense, for their futures, to make a good impression and enhance their chances of sticking in the majors.
The games are still worth the playing and the watching. But I'd believe that regardless; I'd rather watch a minor league game than any NFL game ever played. Certainly the casual fan's interest is going to be down. So expect to plenty of vacant seats at Target Field for these September games.
The Twins schedule this year was a mess from the beginning. Thirty-one of the 81 home dates — 38 percent — were in April and September, which one can pretty much guarantee will be the two worst months for weather. They had nine home games scheduled for the entire month of July.
If it's any consolation (and it probably isn't), nobody was happy with the schedule this year, and the players union reportedly is making an issue of it with the commissioner's office. The union's concern isn't about the bad-weather heavy Minnesota schedule, of course; it's unhappy with the bizarre travel demands put on the players.
Showing posts with label attendance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label attendance. Show all posts
Friday, September 6, 2013
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Attendance and "dynamic pricing"
The Twins' announced attendance for the Monday and Tuesday games against the Yankees didn't reach 30,000, a fact that had Pat Reusse declaring on Twitter that "Twins fans don't give a damn about this team." (When the Wednesday night game drew 38,000 plus, Reusse credited the scheduled fireworks.)
I would think that those figures suggest more that Yankee fans in Minnesota -- and they're out there -- don't care about their team, but never mind that.
A greater point is that in this new age of "dynamic pricing," attendance -- or, more precisely, tickets sold, since that's what is announced -- is not a particularly good measure of fan interest.
Pull out your handy-dandy Twins pocket schedule and examine the seating chart. Note the lack of specific prices. The Twins have not only a bewildering number of section classifications in Target Field, they have five different classifications for games. The Friday-Saturday games last month against Detroit were listed as "elite" games; the Sunday game of that same series was a "premium" game; when Detroit comes to Minnesota for a weekday series in the last week of the season, those games will be "extra value" games, and the tickets will be considerably lower priced.
The result that the same seat is priced differently for different games.
And the point of dynamic pricing isn't to maximize ticket sales; it's to maximize income. These are not the same.
Let me illustrate with some made-up numbers -- made up because (a) I'm not privy to the real numbers and (b) I want to keep this easy to follow.
Imagine a section of 1,000 tickets. If you price them at $10 apiece, you can sell them all for each game, $10,000. Price them at $100, you only have to sell 100 of them to get that same $10,000. Sell 500 of them at that price, you get $50,000 -- and Pat Ruesse sees empty seats.
I suspect that, had the Twins known how little interest there would be in the Yankees as an opponent -- remember, these aren't the Yankees we've come to know and loathe; no Jeter, no A-Rod, no Teixeira, no Granderson -- this series wouldn't have gotten the elite, gouge-the-buyers designation. (Even in Yankee Stadium, ticket sales are down some 6 percent, and the TV ratings are reportedly down an astounding 40 percent.)
But I don't know that for a fact. It's possible that the extra charge levied for these "elite" games against the Yankees more than made up for the fact that about a third of the tickets went unsold. I do suspect that after a few years of dynamic pricing, the Twins will have sufficiently refined the algorithm to find the sweetest spot of revenue.
That's their goal, remember. Not butts in seats, but money in the wallet.
I would think that those figures suggest more that Yankee fans in Minnesota -- and they're out there -- don't care about their team, but never mind that.
A greater point is that in this new age of "dynamic pricing," attendance -- or, more precisely, tickets sold, since that's what is announced -- is not a particularly good measure of fan interest.
Pull out your handy-dandy Twins pocket schedule and examine the seating chart. Note the lack of specific prices. The Twins have not only a bewildering number of section classifications in Target Field, they have five different classifications for games. The Friday-Saturday games last month against Detroit were listed as "elite" games; the Sunday game of that same series was a "premium" game; when Detroit comes to Minnesota for a weekday series in the last week of the season, those games will be "extra value" games, and the tickets will be considerably lower priced.
The result that the same seat is priced differently for different games.
And the point of dynamic pricing isn't to maximize ticket sales; it's to maximize income. These are not the same.
Let me illustrate with some made-up numbers -- made up because (a) I'm not privy to the real numbers and (b) I want to keep this easy to follow.
Imagine a section of 1,000 tickets. If you price them at $10 apiece, you can sell them all for each game, $10,000. Price them at $100, you only have to sell 100 of them to get that same $10,000. Sell 500 of them at that price, you get $50,000 -- and Pat Ruesse sees empty seats.
I suspect that, had the Twins known how little interest there would be in the Yankees as an opponent -- remember, these aren't the Yankees we've come to know and loathe; no Jeter, no A-Rod, no Teixeira, no Granderson -- this series wouldn't have gotten the elite, gouge-the-buyers designation. (Even in Yankee Stadium, ticket sales are down some 6 percent, and the TV ratings are reportedly down an astounding 40 percent.)
But I don't know that for a fact. It's possible that the extra charge levied for these "elite" games against the Yankees more than made up for the fact that about a third of the tickets went unsold. I do suspect that after a few years of dynamic pricing, the Twins will have sufficiently refined the algorithm to find the sweetest spot of revenue.
That's their goal, remember. Not butts in seats, but money in the wallet.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Holidays, attendance and the change of seasons
A couple of tweets from Tuesday evening, on the same topic but apparently independent of each other:
From Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post (@ThomasBoswellWP):
From Twins president Dave St. Peter (@TwinsPrez):
The Twins-White Sox game on Tuesday had an announced attendance of 15,698, which does seem small for a first-place team playing the league rival most despised by the fan base. Wednesday afternoon's gate — 17,336 — wasn't much better. Monday's game drew 21,676, also unimpressive.
That attendance slumps with Labor Day makes sense to me. Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer, and now we all start getting into the rhythms of autumn. Kids are in or getting ready to start school, prime vacation time is past, the daylight is dwindling ... baseball's a part of summer, and most of us are resigned to moving on to the next stage of the year.
Of course, meteorological summer hasn't passed yet. That won't come until Sept. 22. And it occurs to me that we have several holidays that we use to mark the passage of the seasons -- and they all come three to four weeks ahead of the "real" change of season.
Emotional summer begins with Memorial Day; real summer begins in late June..
Emotional autumn beings with Labor Day; real autumn begins later in September.
Emotional winter begins with Thanksgiving; real winter begins a few days before Christmas.
And emotional spring begins ... when? There's no official holiday in late February/early March that truly matches the appeal and acceptance of the other three. It seems to me, in the vagueness of memory, that Lincoln's Birthday and Washington's Birthday were bigger deals in my youth than Presidents' Day or MLK Day are now, but I may be wrong about that.
We probably don't have an early start holiday to start spring because it's difficult to get into the idea when it's still cold and snowy.
The closest I can come to identifying the beginning of emotional spring is no official holiday, and certainly an idiosyncratic choice: the start of spring training. But that's just me; if the rest of the country thought so too, it would be a holiday.
From Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post (@ThomasBoswellWP):
Bad MLB crowds Mon & Tues everywhere (Atl., Cinn, DC, KC, Oak, CWS, Pitt, Sea, Mia, Tor). And all similar crowds. Don't get it.
From Twins president Dave St. Peter (@TwinsPrez):
Lots of small crowds across MLB tonight. The Tuesday after Labor Day is always most challenging date from ticket sales perspective.
The Twins-White Sox game on Tuesday had an announced attendance of 15,698, which does seem small for a first-place team playing the league rival most despised by the fan base. Wednesday afternoon's gate — 17,336 — wasn't much better. Monday's game drew 21,676, also unimpressive.
That attendance slumps with Labor Day makes sense to me. Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer, and now we all start getting into the rhythms of autumn. Kids are in or getting ready to start school, prime vacation time is past, the daylight is dwindling ... baseball's a part of summer, and most of us are resigned to moving on to the next stage of the year.
Of course, meteorological summer hasn't passed yet. That won't come until Sept. 22. And it occurs to me that we have several holidays that we use to mark the passage of the seasons -- and they all come three to four weeks ahead of the "real" change of season.
Emotional summer begins with Memorial Day; real summer begins in late June..
Emotional autumn beings with Labor Day; real autumn begins later in September.
Emotional winter begins with Thanksgiving; real winter begins a few days before Christmas.
And emotional spring begins ... when? There's no official holiday in late February/early March that truly matches the appeal and acceptance of the other three. It seems to me, in the vagueness of memory, that Lincoln's Birthday and Washington's Birthday were bigger deals in my youth than Presidents' Day or MLK Day are now, but I may be wrong about that.
We probably don't have an early start holiday to start spring because it's difficult to get into the idea when it's still cold and snowy.
The closest I can come to identifying the beginning of emotional spring is no official holiday, and certainly an idiosyncratic choice: the start of spring training. But that's just me; if the rest of the country thought so too, it would be a holiday.
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