Diamondbacks attendance may slip below 2M for first time

http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/ ... 1280721600^3727861

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“Baseball is drama with an endless run and an ever-changing cast.”
― Joe Garagiola

In a city the size of Phoenix attendance should never be under 2.5 million a year.

There's no way there were 16k at tonight's game. The Club is providing "tickets sold" instead of legitimate attendance. NBA teams have been doing this for years.

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What can we say about the Diamondbacks Franchise that hasn't already been said about Afghanistan?

The Sidewinders would do that all the time.

"Tonights attendance is 12,381"

-looks around-
Uhhhh....yeahhh about that....

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Per Mare, Per Terras
KC

when they win they will show

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Might be the greatest post in the history of this board

Every team in sports, college on up, reports tickets sold as attendance. Its not like this organization is secretly inflating the #s. I'm sure they have an internal # from every game where they track the turnstiles but there's no requirement that they disclose it. Obviously the actual/sold ratio goes up the better a team is performing.

2014?

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Per Mare, Per Terras
KC

Oh, let's hope attendance doesn't fall that low!

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Meet the new FO... Same as the old FO. The bag may be permanent.

Dre is right in that every organization's numbers are based on tickets sold, not turnstiles. It's always presented by some as if it's some sort of conspiracy to lie about the attendance. But this is just the way it's done.

However eyewitness accounts about how many are actually there is good info too. Obviously the fewer fannies in the seats, the lower the concession revenues, and the weaker the overall "ballpark experience" becomes. So it's important.

Personally, I think the organization should do MUCH more in the way of promotions where they get large groups of kids/campers, etc out to the ballpark during the summer. I realize when you give away too many tickets, you cheapen the overall value of all tickets and can hurt your future ticket sales. But the ballpark looks and feels different when there are an extra 5 or 10,000 kids screaming their heads off at every fly ball. And 1 out of every 10 or 20 of those kids will become rabid fans for life.

In a year like this, that park needs to be full of little kids having fun.

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Good depth often has to come from within, in the form of younger talent. Depth is hard to build overnight, but it’s easy to deplete. Jeff Sullivan

Chad Qualls bobblearm night?

It's just a perfect suck storm right now. The W/L sucks, they've traded some casual fan favorites in Jackson, Haren & Snyder, Webb hasn't been seen anywhere except fishing in Cabo and the economy still sucks with many people still out of work. Ballpark fare costs too much. It's pretty hard to get casual fans excited about going to the ballpark when they could be doing 100 other things that cost less and are more fun. The ONLY thing that'll put butts in the seats on a regular basis is a winning team.

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"Tomorrow is not promised to any of us." - Kirby Puckett

I have been to three blowouts this year. Not to fun to lose an entire day to see your team lose 17-3.

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Per Mare, Per Terras
KC

My closest major league experience is Seattle, and they're pretty much going through the same suckatude that you guys are. For me, I love baseball enough to drive the 350 miles round trip several times a year, but I must admit when the M's put a boring product on the field I cut back a bit (last year I went to 13 M's games, this year it will be 9-10).

The one thing that Seattle has going is a superstar than draws fans. Travel agences in Japan sell travel/ticket packages specifically around Ichiro and Mariner games. As far as players go, he might be the biggest home draw in the game. I think this is what Arizona was trying to do with Eric Byrnes in the desert. I think. Alas, when you don't kniow the difference between a cash cow and just a plain cow, you're doomed to fail.

The team only makes money on tickets they sell. And they don't lose said money when they don't show up. So it's perfectly fair when that's the number presented as attendance. Plus on the in-ballpark announcements, it's often labeled as "Paid attendance", so even then it isn't shady.

It only begins to get iffy when the team counts tickets given away for free as a "sold" ticket. That's where the inflating numbers are a dishonest take on the overall numbers.

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D Hall trying to sell this team to the masses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDhThhrd ... r_embedded

That's the problem. They only show if the team is winning, which means ownership will always be operating as though we're two steps away from chaos/disaster. And it's ridiculous - We enjoy, understand, and appreciate the game. Participation in youth baseball/softball in AZ is off the charts. Until 1998 we made 350 mile drives every summer just for the experience of Dodger Stadium, The Murph, The Big A, and the real big-league uniforms. All the Dbax should have to do is turn the lights on. But the Club marketed themselves as exciting winners, and baseball is going to lose to football/basketball in terms of sheer excitement almost every single time, and if the team ain't winning, things become desperate quickly. It's too bad - in this market, with the cheapest tickets in baseball, the Club shouldn't ever be below 20k.

A big problem is the Club didn't diversify their target audience. They put all their eggs in the 2 parents/2.3 kid basket, and figured us grown-ups that liked baseball would show up regardless of game atmosphere. They were wrong.

A wise guy at the FanFest this year said Arizona is basically all families. While that's historically been the case and they're still a prominent demographic, I think that's becoming an exaggerated perception and am anticipating updated census figures that show the Phoenix Valley is becoming more like other urban centers - more DINC's, more younger unmarried adults, fewer children per family. Back in 2005, in Phoenix Proper, of the 485k households (1.45 million people) in the immediate vicinity, only 1/3 of the households in the City were families with children. 167,000 HH's with kids; 320,000 HH's without kids. And of those HH's, which group is more likely to have the big discretionary dollars it takes to go to a ballgame? It's a lot easier to afford to go to ballgames when you don't have to pay for extra food/clothes, summer camps, music lessons, bigger mortgage on the bigger house, etc.

As for building a sustaining fan-base, it ain't rocket science. The formula for building a sustaining fan-base is very very very simple - The team plays, they win, they lose, the decades pile up, and the number of people who grew up rooting for a team continues to expand. There's no rushing through it, no gimmicks that will find a short-cut through it, it just takes time.

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What can we say about the Diamondbacks Franchise that hasn't already been said about Afghanistan?

This might bring in some fans next year.

http://savannah.sandgnats.milb.com/news ... p

Bill Veeck is turning over in his grave so rapidly right now that if his body had been wrapped in copper wire, he could supply all the power needed at the ballpark for an entire year...

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Meet the new FO... Same as the old FO. The bag may be permanent.

I'll be honest though, DHall should be taking notes. Don't you think that a certain LF being set on fire and rolling around on the field trying to set a record would draw a few more DBBP'ers

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