For years, I’ve relied on the statistical expertise of the brilliant David Kronheim. He is an absolute wizard with numbers and analysis, and luckily for baseball fans, he loves the National Pastime. Therefore, I greatly anticipate the arrival each spring of his detailed analysis of the previous year’s MLB attendance results. Done through David’s firm called Number Tamer, the report for 2015 just became available.
Whenever I’ve written an article where attendance figures are involved, I’ve turned to his analysis to shed a brilliant spotlight on the subject. Time and time again, his assessments have provided my pieces with great insight.
And his annual reports are anything but a dull recitation of how many fans attended a team’s games the previous year. No, he compares each team’s results with previous years, comparing them to all-time highs and lows, and giving a historical perspective that few would think to consider.
And he does so in an entertaining manner, often providing surprising results from history. Here are some nuggets in the just-released 2015 report:
In only one year did every MLB team see an increase in attendance over the previous year. That was the post-war year of 1946, when there was an incredible jump of 70.9% over the crowds of 1945.
Do you know what team has the longest streak of season attendance topping one million? That would be the Dodgers, who’ve done it in Brooklyn and LA every year since 1945.
An interesting phenomenon happened in both Boston and New York when the Red Sox and Yankees became the only teams in town. After 52 straight years of sharing the market with the Boston Braves, when the NL team left for Milwaukee in 1953, the Red Sox attendance actually *decreased* from 1,115,750 to 1,026,133. In New York, when the Giants and Dodgers both left NYC in 1958, the Yanks saw their season attendance drop by 68,696, even though the Bronx Bombers won the World Series that year!
These and hundreds more interesting statistical tidbits can be found in the Major League Baseball 2015 Attendance Analysis. Many thanks to David for his spectacular and fascinating work in this under-appreciated aspect of baseball statistics. The full 212-page report can be found here:
http://numbertamer.com/files/2015_MLB_Attendance_Analysis.pdf