2nd Game Crowd
DMZ · April 4, 2006 at 9:28 pm · Filed Under Mariners
1995 19,336
1996 38,570
1997 30,951
1998 24,523
1999 20,435
2000 29,242 (first Safeco Field instance)
2001 27,212
2002 40,805
2003 35,492
2004 37,947
2005 28,373
2006 20,051
That’s way, way off. And if you watched it on TV, that didn’t look like 20k, either.
I expect the downtrend to continue for awhile, but as long as the Ms dont plunge too far below .500, think we’ll see a healthy rebound arcing past the 04 numbers as people start to see how exciting this team is.
That’s disingenuous, Derek. It’s only a bit below the 1999 crowd.
*ducks*
From the ESPN article about he game, “The Mariners announced an attendance of 20,051 on a chilly night, the second-smallest crowd in Safeco Field’s 6½-year history. The smallest was 19,486 last Sept. 29”
Those numbers don’t jive. I’m betting ESPN is wrong here, but still that’s really really bad for the first night game of the season.
Thank god I love the team even if they suck. This will just make it easier for me to get good tickets cheap!
Whoops, I read Derek’s chart wrong, it looks like ESPN may have been right. Man, that’s even worse.
If the team was down 8K a game over a complete season , we’d barely break 2 million. Eeek.
Or, as they’d say in Oakland,
“w00t! 2 million!!! And we didn’t even have to win a World Series!!!”
I was there. I took a couple shots of the nice empty stadium, complete with making sure I got the scoreboard with the time on it so you could see that it was taken at 7:05pm. It was quite empty – there’s no way in hell there were 20k people there, seriously.
(which is a shame, because it was a pretty fun game, aside from being FREAKIN’ COLD)
The attendance is always for PAID attendance, not how many walked thru the turnstiles. Considering the weather and the loss in game 1, I’m not surprised that so many that had tickets chose not to attend.
The Ms always count tickets sold, not attendance.
The obvious padding was bigger last year; as the number of season tickets sold goes down, fewer people are buying tickets and not going.
They didn’t even bother to play Guess The Attendance. There’s no way it was 20K. I’d guess 16K.
I was there with Deanna. Indeed, we noticed how depressingly empty Safeco Field was. There was nothing but empty seats and maybe a few fans in half of the view reserved sections. And the box seats were about 70% full, maybe. I can’t imagine they had 20,000 people tonight.
As a matter of fact, we joked about there being no Guess the Attendance. “Is the first digit a 1 or a 2?”
To add to Churchill’s point, I also think the compelling Pineiro vs Lackey pitching matchup led to people staying home.
#9 said “The Ms always count tickets sold, not attendance.”
It’s not the M’s, it’s an MLB policy that the teams must announce tickets sold not actual attendance. Until a few years ago, one of the leagues announced tickets sold and the other announced actual attendance…
To be fair, Seattle fans are rarely in their seats by the first pitch. Even opening day looked sparse until into the second inning. Still, it’s going to be a dismal year.
Maybe they’ll reinstitue Kingdome-esque looking the other way when you sneak into good seats!
It makes complete sense, but it sure is interesting to see just how big an impact revolultionary seasons like 1995 and 2001 were in regard to attendance the following year.
Just look at that, without contextual considerations and attempts to be disingenuous (cough), attendance nearly doubled from Game 2 1995 to 1996, and in 2002 jumped 13,600 from 2001.
Are there analysts that get paid to show ownership that it really pays to put a winning product on the field???
I was under the impression it’s not just tickets sold, but that the numbers they now announce also include comp tickets (those the Ms give away in big chunks to things like the Boys & Girls club, to make it sound like their ticket sales weren’t quite so dismal).
The home opener has been an automatic sellout since the Revival ten years ago—but this year they were still hawking tickets two days before. Unless the Ms rip of a real winning tear, attendance is already on trend to tank seriously; yes, down to around 2 mil. The ol’ cash cow has been steaked, one does suppose.
I’m one of those who think that a solid .500-ish team that at least is exciting to watch will end up drawing more people. However, 97-esque bullpen implosions will drive them away.
I don’t believe it counts giveaways. It’s supposed to be paid attendance.
Maybe they’ll reinstitue Kingdome-esque looking the other way when you sneak into good seats!
They were letting people do it last year after the third inning. And seeing how the staffing levels appear to be down as well, I think you’d be able to do it earlier this year.
I was under the impression it’s not just tickets sold, but that the numbers they now announce also include comp tickets (those the Ms give away in big chunks to things like the Boys & Girls club, to make it sound like their ticket sales weren’t quite so dismal).
Giveaways != paid, so they don’t count in “paid attendance,” which both leagues have used since 1993.
Now, if they were using the old “actual” rules the NL had before ’93, they might get away with handing out thousands of comp’d tickets to bump up attendance, but even then they’d have to overcome the 2-3K last night that paid but didn’t walk through the turnstiles.
Maybe they’ll reinstitue Kingdome-esque looking the other way when you sneak into good seats!
Now that brings back memories of that Yankees/M’s brawl in 96. I had snuck down to second row seats and got to yell all sorts of “scoreboard” comments (it was 8-2 M’s at the time). Ah, good times.
The second-day to first-day ratio reminds me on what we experienced in Montreal. The “attitude” of the first-day crowd would always be very enthusiastic (which seems different from what was reported here yesterday). However, when Montreal would get 15,000 or less, the atmosphere would not be very good. It’s always like a death spiral where once you get below the “enthusiastic” level, it gets progressively worse. Is Seattle that kind of place?
Odd that this discussion pops up here, as a similar discussion is going on over at BigSoccer.com about how MLS reports attendance (tickets distributed) vs. other leagues. The same discussion of the old NL/AL rules happened over there not 48 hours ago…
#20 DW wrote “Giveaways != paid, so they don’t count in “paid attendance,†which both leagues have used since 1993.”
There’s kind of a grey line there. A lot of the tickets that the M’s earmark for charity are actually sold to the charitable organizations for $1 each (and they say $1 on the ticket!) I don’t know for sure if they are counting them as “paid tickets” but it would make sense that they are doing so as that would seem to be the best explanation as to why they are charging the charities tnis nominal fee…
Two factors put the tickets sold “attendance” over 20,000 last night: (1) there are 16,000 season tickets; (2) not all 16,000 ticket holders were able to stand in line on Edgar Martinez Way on Opening Day in order to exchange their tickets to last night’s game for a better game later in the year.
Tango, yes, Seattle can be that kind of place, although with the size of Safeco and the roof open, the dividing line is probably closer to 25,000. Except for nights Felix pitched, the crowds during the second half of last season were, in a word, numb. Extended exposure to Gil Meche and Ryan Franklin tends to do that to people.
Which was why I was a few minutes late to the USSM feed- I traded in a bunch of my 16 game plan for better tickets. Monday night against KC? Pass.
Well, and not all “season tickets” are for the whole season, either. I’m sure they count us 16-game-plan peons in those figures as well, so realistically, the actual season ticket seats “sold” yesterday were some 80-gamers, half the 40-gamers, and 1/5th of the 16-gamers (maybe more with the weekday-only 16-game plan, but I don’t feel like doing the math).