Don’t forget to add in parking and concessions revenue. If each fan is paying $24 per ticket, they’re probably paying at least another $5 on average in associated costs (the “four hot dogs and colas, team hat and team pennant” cost-of-attendance BS) then those contracts do indeed pay for themselves.

You know, this reminded me of something I looked into a while back; I think I posted something about this on an earlier thread but I’ll throw it in here:

Let’s assume that statement is true. We can then calculate something we might call “Expected Win-Driven Attendance” by dividing one year’s attendance by the previous year’s win total. For the M’s, we see something interesting:

Year....Wins...Attendance.....EWDA
2007.....88.....2,672,409....34,262
2006.....78.....2,480,717....35,952
2005.....69.....2,689,529....42,691
2004.....63.....2,940,731....31,621
2003.....93.....3,268,509....35,145
2002.....93.....3,542,938....30,543
2001....116.....3,507,326....38,542
2000.....91..........

If we ignore 2005 (I’ll come back to that in a minute), you’ll note how consistent the numbers are. It’s basically 33500 plus or minus a couple of thousand for every win the team had the previous year — which also happens to be a pretty good one-game attendance figure. Essentially, for every game they win one year they get another good crowd the next.

But 2005 is the obvious outlier. What happened there? Well, they were coming off the disastrous 63-win ’04 year. You might be tempted to argue that year drove away the casual fans, and all that were left were the die-hards. But look at 2006: there were even fewer die-hards that year, despite 2005 being an improved year in terms of wins. No, it’s pretty clear something else happened in 2005, and that something else was Richie Sexson and Adrian Beltre. The ’04-’05 off-season, as I’m sure you recall, was the year the M’s finally started acting like a big-market team and went shopping for free agents. Now, did they do that because they finally felt financially comfortable? Because Bill Bavasi persuaded ownership to open the purse? Or did they do that because they did the same calculation I just did here? After all, it’s an easy and obvious calculation to do. And if you were the owners sitting around in the autumn of ’04, knowing that you get about 33,500 fans for every win, knowing that you had just 63 wins, you wouldn’t like where the math was taking you. 63 wins times 33,500 fans is just 2 million, almost a full million less than the year before. That’s ugly. In fact, for a business, that’s terrifying. One third fewer customers? So you open your wallets and make a splash, hoping that will be enough to draw in more fans than your win total gives you any right to expect.

And it worked. In fact, using the average EWDA value (excluding the ’05 season) of 34,344 we can calculate how many fans should have attended, based just on the previous year’s win total:

Year.....Attendance.....Projected.....Variance.....%
2007.....2,672,409..... 2,678,841 ......-6,432.....0%
2006.....2,480,717..... 2,369,744 .....110,973.....5%
2005.....2,689,529..... 2,163,679 .....525,850....24%
2004.....2,940,731..... 3,194,003 ....-253,272....-8%
2003.....3,268,509..... 3,194,003 ......74,506.....2%
2002.....3,542,938..... 3,983,918 ....-440,980...-11%
2001.....3,507,326..... 3,125,315 .....382,011....12%

Yeah, maybe that 116 win ’01 should’ve given more of a bump than it did, but take a look at ’05. The M’s got a cool half million more fans than they had any business seducing to the ballpark. At a rough average $24 per ticket, that’s $12M. Sexson and Beltre together cost $14.5M that year (though if you calculate the real cost of Sexson’s backloaded contract and signing bonus, it’s obviously more). Plus whatever those two contributed to the win total in the following years (it’s worth noting the M’s haven’t undershot their expected attendance since). Was it worth it? I think you can make the case that it was: 2M fans is less than 27K per game; factor in those NY and BOS sell-outs, and ’05 would’ve had a lot of Kingdome-in-the-80s nights, with no way for TV to hide the scattering of fans in the stands and HR balls bouncing around in the bleachers for minutes before somebody can get over to grab them. Ugly indeed. And perhaps the beginning of another vicious circle of dropping budgets and spiraling attendance.

Anyway, that was then, and this is now. And now we can make a prediction: barring some equivalent offseason splash (eg, Santana), the 88 wins this year should push the M’s back to right around 3M attendance next year.

Try reading some OSS source code….

I won’t be surprised with the higher ticket prices and the mediorce team, if attendance dips that low.

The best predictor of full season attendance is the previous season’s winning percentage, so I expect we’ll draw significantly more fans in 2008 than in 2007.

Plus, I don’t see a lot of evidence of price elasticity in professional sports attendance, so I’d throw out your second -5% as well.