I have said for years that the remedy for the poor attendance at Camden Yards is not signing premier free agents, not signing "exciting name players" for marketing purposes, not putting "Baltimore" back on the away jerseys and not a better customer experience at the park. Those things are nice but the factor that was going to move the needle for attendance was always going to be more wins.
Winning was the key. Baltimore is a good baseball town and if you put a competitive club on the field, the people will come.
Now we have a winner and I thought I'd take a look at how we are doing. After 30 home games, the Orioles are 35-26. Through 30 home games last season, the team was 26-31. In 2011, the team had muddled along at a few games under .500 for most of the year. This season, the Orioles came screaming out of the gate and have hovered around first place for most of the season. How's that working out for ticket sales?
Average attendance for 2011 through this point was 19,022 and average attendance for 2012 is 25,325. That is 6,303 more people per game or an increase of 33% over this time last year. It's still a bit early to pinpoint a real trend but that's an impressive jump. We'll keep an eye on this each month and see how all this winning helps things at the turnstile.
1 comment:
While it always seems that us bird fans seem to be more fair weather than most there are some outliers about this season you need to look at such as: Interleague games (the game we just played against the Phillies) brought in a lot of local crowds, how many times we have played the Yankees and Red Sox. Unfortunately unless you measure that as well it will be hard to determine the situation as of today.
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