Before we get to the heat of the playoff race here in September (I know – too late), here’s a few different stats to use in gauging how the 2018 season is going.
The Atlanta Braves have played 71 games at home this year – 10 dates remain at SunTrust Park. That fact alone might actually help them, if trends continue as they have started this season.
You see, Atlanta is only 37-34 at home… 3 games above .500. They are now 40-29 on the road, and have 12 more road games to play. All things being equal (they aren’t, but we’ll run the exercise anyway), this suggests maybe 5-5 at home and 7-5 away… for an 89 win season.
Of course to get to 89 wins – if that’s the number – Philadelphia will have to win 16 of their remaining 23 contests. But this is exactly why every Braves win, every Phillies loss, and every day checked off the calendar is raising the urgency for the Phils.
Attention to Attendance
When at home, the Braves have entertained 2,242,804 fans thus far. This extrapolates to 2,558,692 for the season… and probably a bit more than that given that more games from this point should be close to capacity. Thus 2.6 million is certainly not out of reach (it would require averaging 35,720 for the rest of the home dates).
The Braves are now 7th best in attendance increase (on a ‘per game’ basis) in baseball. It’s not a dramatic difference over 2017 (+897), and that’s not terribly surprising since SunTrust Park was this new shiny thing last season that many wanted to experience.
13 clubs have increased attendance over 2017, with Houston enjoying a whopping additional 6,921 fans per game. Milwaukee, the Yankees, Phillies, Seattle, Arizona, Dodgers, Rockies, A’s, Nats, Padres, and Angels round out that list.
Some are decrying the lower baseball attendance figures overall, and that’s true: the numbers are down by 1,357 per game. This downfall is led by 6 specific clubs: Texas (rebuilding), Baltimore (setting charges to blow it all up), Pittsburgh (ownership annoyed fans last off-season), Detroit (a tepid rebuild), the Royals (now a couple of years removed from their World Series, they are rebuilding), Miami, and Toronto (also ready to call ‘fire in the hole!’).
Each of those cities is seeing ticket-buying down by roughly 5,000+ per game, with Toronto and Miami each down 10,000+.
Miami is a special situation, in that they chose not to fake their numbers any longer. So they have gone from a reported ~20,000 per game in 2017 to ~10,000 in 2018.
So yeah: “attendance is down”… but if you don’t examine why that’s the case, you’ll miss the fact that these 6 cities account for all of that drop – and a lot more.
(All data cited, courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com – various tables)