Capstone // Season Performance
Finally, we look at teams’ performance and how these compare to attendance. The table above shows each team’s performance during the regular season as measured in standard MLB decimal percentage format (e.g., a .531 season means a team won 53.1% of regular season games that season). Seasons with a dark blue bar indicate that the team made it to the postseason that year (including Wild Card games/series), while seasons with a light blue bar indicate that the team was not a postseason contender that year. The line that spans through the bar chart measures our standardized home game attendance as a percentage of total capacity.
It should be noted that 2021 percentage of capacity is based on full capacity and not adjusted for the first half of the season, during which most venues had limited capacity. It does take the Toronto Blue Jays playing at TD Ballpark in Dunedin, FL and Sahlen Field in Buffalo, NY, into account, and uses capacity figures for the games played at those venues until their return to Rogers Centre on July 30, 2021. Performance and attendance for 2020 and 2021 were kept for this visual to better illustrate the effect between performance one season and attendance the following season.
Results
By far, the factors with the most influence on attendance are on-the-field factors. Sure, there are loyal fans who’ll go to their team’s games no matter how they’re performing– but most people want to see an exciting game and a winning team!
Notably, whether a team made it to the playoffs the previous season had a bigger effect on attendance for any given year compared to whether a team made it the playoffs that same year. Obviously, fans don’t know whether a team will make it to the playoffs during the season (at least not until we get into magic number territory late in the season), but making it to the playoffs could serve as a barometer for overall performance that year. Still, the effect of the previous season’s playoff qualification carries on to the next season, even when performance during that next season is worse.
Overall win percentage and playoff contention are not the only factors correlated to increased attendance, but they are among the ones with the strongest correlations. Other factors also present strong correlations, especially compared with off-field factors discussed earlier:
Most factors related to off-field variables have very weak correlations with attendance, while those related to team performance tend to be the strongest indicators of attendance.