The Ongoing Attendance Problem

[Amherstcavsfan]

Again, the problem is the lack of star power in Cleveland. When the Indians lost their 90's stars, they lost a lot of the casual fanbase. Then when they lost the aughts stars, they lost some of the hard core fanbase.

While I like to think that Dolan is going to make every effort to keep some of these guys, I know that keeping them all is not going to happen. And we all know that unless its the Browns, Cleveland fans do not support sports franchises without stars.

 

[Steve_424]

Again, the problem is the lack of star power in Cleveland. When the Indians lost their 90's stars, they lost a lot of the casual fanbase. Then when they lost the aughts stars, they lost some of the hard core fanbase.

While I like to think that Dolan is going to make every effort to keep some of these guys, I know that keeping them all is not going to happen. And we all know that unless its the Browns, Cleveland fans do not support sports franchises without stars.

The ugly truth.

 

[Real Deal]

If we make the playoffs 2 years in a row do you guys think it will go up?

I think if we make the wild card 2 years in a row, it will excite this town and support will only go up.

 

[bushwick_bill]

Because it's more fun being an optimistic, supportive fan than a pessimistic stick in the mud?

This Tribe team is far from shity.

 

[Gimme Some Mo]

Posted this in the game thread, but reposting here......

Indians should do something like the Cavs did this year for a few games.... Post an easy question on the website and say if you answer it correctly you get 2 free tickets to a game in April/May.

Nobody goes to these early games. Why not do this? At least you get people down to the game to spend money on concessions. It's better than just eating the tickets and making no money at all. It won't sell out the stadium, but it will make them more money.

 

[Nom]

I'm not stuck in the mud. I have low expectations and have been proved right every year. People that expect a WS title are let down and are stuck in the mud.

If you are right every year, that means you predicted an 80 win season last year - but if you predicted that, then you didn't have low expectations. Did you also have low expectations in '07? Were those proven right?

 

[MoFlo]

Posted this in the game thread, but reposting here......

Indians should do something like the Cavs did this year for a few games.... Post an easy question on the website and say if you answer it correctly you get 2 free tickets to a game in April/May.

Nobody goes to these early games. Why not do this? At least you get people down to the game to spend money on concessions. It's better than just eating the tickets and making no money at all. It won't sell out the stadium, but it will make them more money.

Agree completely.

Plus, it'll give some fans the chance to take a liking to the team and/or a few of their players and maybe form an attachment of some sort to the club.

 

[Mad Hatter]

I come back to this chart. The Indians had a better winning % than 16 teams over a 10 year span. And a payroll higher than 11 of them.

We can sit here and bitch about this team - but the fact that they are consistently in the bottom 5 in attendance doesn't match-up to their performance on the field. They aren't a bottom 5 team.

As I'm sure you're aware, using that particular 10 year average is skewed, as it includes 1999, 2000, and 2001 - when we were still a dominant team in the AL, but also had the 4th, 8th, and 5th highest payrolls in baseball. And besides that, it's not even a 10 year average, it's a 12 year average (1999-2010). Try the actual 10 year average of 2002-2011 instead and see where we end up. It will of course be below .500, and much lower down the list of average payrolls.

All that chart shows is that being among the top 15 - and especially top 10 - payrolls is very likely to get you into the playoffs repeatedly, and being in the bottom 15 makes it very likely that you will be left out. If you do not intend on spending enough to end up in the upper half of payrolls, you should not expect to compete in baseball. It's really that simple. Sure, teams in the bottom 15 (and even bottom 10) payrolls make the playoffs sometimes, but they almost never have any sustained success from season to season. A select few manage to have everything line up just right for them, with all their young talent peaking at once, to put together a small run... but still end up having to ship off their stars and rebuild again because they are unwilling or unable to spend.

Baseball needs a salary cap and a salary floor, or this will never change. We will continually have the odds stacked against us season after season. We will continually be unable to keep our top players. The last few years I wasn't going to games, but I was still watching. This year I don't even want to watch baseball anymore because I'm so disgusted with the structure of the sport today. It has lost all entertainment value for me. So I can't really blame anyone else, in Cleveland or in other cities, who chooses to spend their money elsewhere. I still can't get over having two Cy Young winners in a row who were both immediately traded for scraps, one with a year and a half still left on his contract. Then they end up playing against each other in game 1 of the World Series. It's a joke.

 

[bushwick_bill]

It is barely below .500. We have 784 wins out of 1620 games since 2002, which is .484 percentage.

And in 2001 we won 91 games.

 

[Nom]

I get that the data is older - but I didn't compile it myself and was the best I could find. I know it falls outside of the ten-year window but I believe is still within Dolans ownership which is the over-arching complaint by most fans.

 

[Mad Hatter]

It is barely below .500. We have 784 wins out of 1620 games since 2002, which is .484 percentage.

And in 2001 we won 91 games.

Correct, in 2001 when we were 5th in baseball in payroll. Let's just break down every year since 1994, how much we spent compared to the rest of baseball, and where we finished.

YEAR	SALARY	 FINISH

1994	19th	 2nd
1995	9th	 1st / WS
1996	4th	 1st / ALDS
1997	4th	 1st / WS
1998	4th	 1st / ALCS
1999	4th	 1st / ALDS
2000	8th	 2nd
2001	5th	 1st / ALDS
2002	9th	 3rd
2003	26th	 4th
2004	27th	 3rd
2005	26th	 2nd
2006	25th	 4th
2007	23rd	 1st / ALCS
2008	16th	 3rd
2009	15th	 4th
2010	24th	 4th
2011	26th	 2nd
2012	21st

Dolan bought the team in 2000. Of course you do not see a massive reduction in salary the year he bought it; many contracts were already signed and had to be paid out. But after 2002, when most of our highly paid all-stars from the 90s were gone, you can see that the payroll fell off a cliff and has never recovered. 2003 was the start of a full rebuild so that is understandable. And I'm not saying we have to have a top 5 payroll like in the 90s. But by 2007, we should have been spending a lot more if we really expected to seriously compete year after year. Only in 2008-2009 did we finally spend a bit more after the ALDS appearance in 2007. But in truth, that was mostly due to the escalating contracts of guys like Sabathia, Westbrook, and Hafner. We made no real moves in free agency, which was a massive failure.

Look again at 1994 on the list above. We were only 19th in overall payroll that year, but it was clear before the strike hit that we had the framework of a perennial contender. So what did we do? We went out in free agency and brought in players to supplement that young team. What was the result? I think everyone knows: division champs for 6 of the next 7 years and two World Series appearances. In 2007, after a four year rebuild, we once again had the framework of a perennial contender. But no effort was made in free agency to supplement that team with another all-star or two. Instead, we'd already start shipping off key members of that 2007 team the very next season. (One could even argue that the framework was in place earlier, in 2005 after that 93 win season. Our 05-06 offseason was then highlighted by giving away Brandon Phillips essentially for free.)

You must spend to win. That is the nature of modern baseball. You must retain your star players or buy them from someone else. We are unable or unwilling to do that. We once again sat on our hands this last offseason. I'm not going to argue about small market vs. large market. I'll be the first to tell you that the entire system is broken and heavily favors those teams that have huge TV contracts or other lucrative sources of revenue. Everyone here knows that. But that is reality, and we can't continue to linger in the bottom 10 of payrolls and expect to compete (or expect fans to pack the stadium).

 

[Nom]

That's not true - the 5 highest payrolls are all under Dolan. He didn't slash payroll - TV contracts allowed teams in big markets to vastly outspend smaller markets.

In '97 The Yankees were spending around $70 million - now they're over $200 million.

The Dolans bought the team thinking they could spend with the big boys on the old system (as they have with payrolls of $70-80 million) but the game changed and TV contracts turned what would've been high payrolls into low payrolls.

Just showing their rank isnt even close to the full story considering most revenue is generated from the size of your market - not your owner or your attendance.

 

[Mad Hatter]

That's not true - the 5 highest payrolls are all under Dolan. He didn't slash payroll - TV contracts allowed teams in big markets to vastly outspend smaller markets.

In '97 The Yankees were spending around $70 million - now they're over $200 million.

The Dolans bought the team thinking they could spend with the big boys on the old system (as they have with payrolls of $70-80 million) but the game changed and TV contracts turned what would've been high payrolls into low payrolls.

Just showing their rank isnt even close to the full story considering most revenue is generated from the size of your market - not your owner or your attendance.

I'm not really disagreeing with you. I'm not even necessarily blaming Dolan directly. The game did change, you're right. And what would have been a top 5 payroll in the late 90s is now a bottom 10 payroll. That doesn't change the fact that those kind of payrolls aren't enough to be competitive anymore. The rank IS what's important now. You don't have to spend in the top 5, but bottom 10 payrolls should be reserved for rebuilding years, not teams that are expected to be competitive. If Dolan, or any other owner, can't spend enough to at least get us up into the upper half of teams in overall payroll (again, after we have the framework of a contender in place, like we did in 2007), then we will simply never be able to compete for multiple years in a row. There's not enough time to do so when you are turning over your roster every 5 years. And fan interest is killed every time you let one of your best players go, especially for little in return.

2007 was the time to act. The payroll was only $61m for a young, talented team. Increasing the investment in the team when we had a contender in place would have likely kept us strong for several years, boosted fan interest even more, and also increased attendance significantly, providing more revenue. They did extend some of our best players at the time like Pronk, but that was not enough. They seem to believe they can just skip free agency every year and still have a good enough roster to compete. Then they throw away our best assets like Phillips and Lee. At some point you have to be willing to pull the trigger and make a bigger investment. Now fans don't even want to support the team when they are decent, because they don't trust ownership or management to do anything to help sustain the success. So attendance plummets to among the worst in MLB when the team is not nearly bad enough to warrant that.

 

[cdt]

I just don't understand how Detroit can pay Verlander Cabrera and Fielder. The Reds with Phillips (d'oh!) and Votto.

Yet we don't have one marquee player...not one guy a person out of town can say man were in Cleveland lets go see this guy or that guy.

Traded back to back LEFT handed Cy Young winners and who did we get out of that?

It's a myriad of things...
We never land the big fish and if we find one we trade him.
The owner has made stupid fan turning off comments. "When they come we'll spend".
Cleveland's economy is in the shitter and population is down.
Interest in baseball is lower these days with many fans turned off by a lack of salary cap.

 

[Huber.]

Where is b00bie to explain why the Reds can pay Votto but we can't sign Joe Schmo? You can't blame it on the Reds tv market since they're smaller or the same size as Cleveland. We all need a sarcastic breakdown of this situation.