Also, Griffey cures cancer
The M’s reported a 2009 profit to the PFD, putting us one step closer to starting to recoup the Safeco Field costs, rebounding from their reported 2008 loss (and I’m just going to skip my usual digressions about that). Their financial position’s clearly better, and that’s good.
Anyway, I wanted to point out this is how Jim Street wrote the lead paragraph in that story for MLB.com:
The Mariners made a profit in 2009, thanks to a 24-game improvement in the win column and the return of Ken Griffey Jr.
Nothing in the story mentions any kind of financial breakdown at all. 2.2 million people came out in 2009, which was dooooooown from 2.3 million in 2008. Did ticket revenue go up because of new pricing? What was the media split? How’d they manage that, exactly? Did they sell an extra million Griffey jerseys at the team store?
If you read on, you’ll hear again that they won more games and Griffey came back. Which is not helpful if you’re curious. Repetition of a contention is not support for that contention.
It’s lazy reporting. The story’s better off without this recycling of worn storylines.
Back at the start of last year, callers were on the radio, wiping a tear from their eye and announcing that for the chance to watch Junior one more time, they’d be buying more tickets, they’d be buying season tickets, they’d be coming back to Safeco (MarinerFansComeHome.org?)
Wish there was some way to quantify just how many actually followed through.
Few, it would seem
There’s no way to quantify the number of fans that came to see Griffey. But consider this: When a team finishes as badly as the M’s did in ’08, the next season would tend to see a big drop off in attendance. Add to that the fact that in ’08 the unemployment rate in Washington was a LOT less than in ’09, and I think it’s safe to say that under “normal” circumstances, we should have seen a much deeper cut in attendance than 100,000.
That said, with payroll being about the same in ’09 and ’08, and 100K less in attendance, where did the money come from to create a profit in ’09, as apposed to a loss in ’08??
Dave’s right; that was just plain lazey reporting.
You have to remember, these articles are not written for people who care about the numbers and the facts, it is written to rally the fans who like the simple pleasures of a game on a sunny day and a place to take their kids. I work in the Sodo area, and it might sound condescending, but most fans don’t care about the details of the revenue, they just want to be validated on what they see (ie everyone loving Griffey) and to be entertained.
Plus, it makes the organization’s life a whole lot easier not to have to answer the probing questions like the financials. The less people know, the more flexibility they have, and bottom line, this is a business. They might like to project the warm and cuddly aspect of the game, but anyone who knows baseball knows that most of the warmness and cuddliness of the game is just the marketing campaign and their spin.
Please don’t knock the propaganda machine.
(ahem. Derek.)
Also, yeah, I have no idea how huge the drop would have been otherwise.
But we have years of recent data on how the team draws as wins fluctuate. We can at least be sure the Griffey effect was not so huge. It may have been what people said drew them, but in actual effect, not as much.
Ugh. Even mentioning Jim Street’s name here taints this place.
Dang it, Derek, I’m trying to live in denial about Street’s existence! You’re harshing my buzz, man.
Reporter held hostage by own subject matter. Film at 11!
Dear Mr Street,
I read the article on the Seattle Mariners and 2009 profit and it did not make complete sense to me. I’m sure you know what the word profit means but your article didn’t mention if revenues were up or if expenses were down from 2008.
Also, i’m fairly certain that Griffey was best known for being a strong member in the club house and a good hitter but i don’t think that MLB revenue is correlated to clubhouse atmosphere. Perhaps there was a change in ballpark revenue or television and merchandising that affected the team profit but this is probably correlated to the actions of the general manager or the economy.
Regards,
This is important. People are notoriously bad at identifying their own motivations for doing things.
This is part of what caused the downfall of GM. They built cars Americans said they wanted. Unfortunately, those weren’t the cars Americans actually wanted (as measured by what cars they bought).
We can, at best, infer motivations by measuring behaviour. Asking people about their motivations typically produces rationalisation or wishful thinking.
Isn’t this overboard cynical? Have you ever been to a game with a little kid? Do you remember the first time you walked into a major league park? Now, marketers may exploit these feelings for the purposes of selling tickets, but I can’t accept that the magic of baseball is merely illusion.
Dear Mr. Armstrong,
You brought back Griffey and fewer people came. Maybe if you dump him more will come? Worth a shot.
I’m can’t be the only one that really hates seeing this in an argument, right?
No it’s not merely an illusion, and yes, my comments are cynical.
I am a fan and love going to games on a sunny day and taking my nieces and nephews too, but my point is, for the people who work year-round at Safeco and delve into the business operations, that magical-kid like quality is often lost and used to exploit. The Seattle Mariners are a huge business operation and most of the moves are made based on that fact. Is that bad? No not necessary, but it is reality.
I thought I had seen, e.g. here
that payroll was down by $20 million. My first thought from the above was that payroll was probably the biggest factor. (recall, we dropped Sexson’s and Vidro’s big contracts)
As a reporter who was taught how to do data analysis stories, these things always have irritated me. It’s not necessarily that Street is lazy, it’s that what he is trying to do is virtually impossible. You can say that attendance is up and that Griffey is here but you have NOTHING to show a causal relationship. I’ve had to do these crimes against nature myself. “National park attendance is up because of the bad economy.” (You can say attendance is up, you can’t say why.) “Attendance at the local festival is up because of high gas prices.” (You can prove the first, you have zero evidence for the second.) It’s all crap but I don’t know that it’s necessarily Street’s fault. Just like a lot of reporters, he might have known better but was told to write the story anyway.
Fair enough…to a point. But I guess you could say the same thing about Walt Disney. Did he ‘exploit’…or just expand the experience to more people?
Probably both, I guess.
What I am wondering, and I seem to be missing the knowledge of is… whether or not there enough information released by the M’s about the profits of the 2009 season to allow for an article that has substance? I don’t disagree that Street was grasping on straws and shouldn’t have published the article, but what kind of details did he have to work with?
Baseball Reference has league wide comparison of attendence between 2008 and 2009, the average per game decline was 2152, the M’s went down 1656 per game, so they did better than league average. But there were 9 teams that saw increases, KC lead the pack at +2,703 per game. The Mets saw the biggest decline at -10,784.
YUNI!!!
Aren’t merchandise sales shared equally by all clubs? At least that’s the way I thought it worked. Selling Griffey jerseys would help Houston as much as it would Seattle, no?
Only the licensing cut of merchandise sales is shared by all clubs. By selling the jersey at the team-owned store, the team keeps the full retailer’s cut of the sales.
Revenue-sharing money comes from two pools. One is central fund revenue, which comes from national television and radio deals, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, merchandise sales and the newly formed MLB Network. Each of the 30 clubs got a check for about $30 million in 2009 through this arrangement.
The other pool is the one that has created tension between small- and large-revenue clubs, as it is the one that transfers money between franchises. This pool is made up of net local revenues, such as ticket sales, concessions and media deals that each club negotiates for television and radio.”
(re: the latter, as I understand it, “local revenue” is ticket sales, concessions, merchandise, corporate sponsorships, and local broadcast deals.)
In following Seattle sports for 30 years, I’d say the following are the main factors in attendance:
1. Success on the field. Big gap to anything else.
2. Not having an obnoxious owner. See Argyros, Behring, Ackerley in the early years until he got smart and withdrew from attention, the boys from OKC, obviously, and the real Exhibit A, the guys who bought the NASL Sounders and drove the team into the ground in a single offseason. Seattle fans will not support an obnoxious owner.
3. Promotions.
4. The opposition. They could sell out the Kingdome for an exhibition against the Bulls with Jordan while not selling out the Coliseum for regular season games. Any Mariners fan in the eighties and early 90s remembers what it was like when the Yankees, Red Sox and Blue Jays came to town.
The starting pitcher, the weather, carrying a famous veteran (Franco Harris, Patrick Ewing, Ken Griffey, Jr.), I don’t see any relation to attendance. Sure, they could announce Griffey’s retirement and hold a “Day” (do they do that anymore?) on a Tuesday night against Kansas City in July, and probably get a nice bump for one night, but that’s just a promotion. But given the guy wasn’t guaranteed to be in the lineup any particular game last season, who really is going to come to a game and say to their kid, “that’s Ken Griffey, Jr., the one on the rail with 24 on his back, cheering on the guys on the field?”
Documenting the intangible Griffey revenue effect could be the next great challenge of sabermetrics. Up there with context-dependent tickling. (Clubhouse, good. Halls of Congress, bad.)
I just got done with a 99-page research paper on public stadium financing (in fact, I had it bound today).
This is brilliantly horrible reporting. Egad!
Also, in case you were wondering, there is no direct economic benefit to having a sports team or facility in your town unless there is no public money going toward it whatsoever.
Perhaps this should read “Griffey cures clubhouse cancers.”
Were we expecting any different from a guy who can’t even get the ages and stats right on any given player?
Dude should’ve stayed retired.
Chuck Armstrong was on John Clayton’s show today. (MP3)
Season tickets, we’ve already gone past our budgetary goal. Last year we hit a naydare (?) for season tickets since we moved into SafeCo Field, but we budgeted after our year that we would be higher this year and we’ve already exceeded our budgetary goal by over a 1,000 season tickets.
We’re already tracking well ahead of last year.