Thursday, February 01, 2007

Baseball-reference survey and attendance categorization

I can't imagine there's anyone who reads this blog who isn't familiar with baseball-reference.com, but they are currently doing a survey to find out what features of the site people do and don't like, and what they should work on next, and such.

If you're one of the first 1500 people to take the survey, you'll get credited with $2 towards sponsoring a page, which means you could either sponsor some completely obscure player, or put it towards sponsoring a page normally. (I currently sponsor 11 players on b-ref. 10 are easily identifiable and the 11th is Doyle. Though, recently I'm thinking I should just subscribe to their Play Index service rather than sponsoring pages.)

Anyway, one of the questions in the survey was:
How many major and minor league baseball games per year do you go to?
a. 0
b. 1-3
c. 4-10
d. 11-500

Ummmmmmmmmmm.

500 games a year? Is that even possible? Even given the span of about 180 days that the baseball season covers, if you somehow went to 2 games per day, that'd still be 360, and you could maaaaaybe add in winter leagues to pad that number a bit more. But is there actually a locale where you could reasonably live and do that all year round? Are there even enough weekday afternoon games? I was dead tired after just going to two games in one day in Osaka, and besides doubleheaders, I've never done it over here. I'm pretty sure MLB scheduling tries to make it such that two major league teams in the same metro area are never in town at the same time anyway, although you could always drive between close cities such as Philly and NYC or DC, and/or attend minor league games.

As you can guess, I fit into that last category easily, but still. I'm sort of surprised that those are the delimiters. I would have put it at something like 0, 1-5, 6-20, and 21+, maybe. 1-5 is definitely in the range of "I go when my company or my friends give me tickets", 6-20 is in the range of "I go pretty often, I might even share a season ticket plan or have one of the limited ones", and then 21+ is "I have season tickets / I'm addicted to baseball / I'm stalking Chase Utley" territory.

I'm sort of curious, though -- what do other people see as the boundaries there? I really don't know what normal baseball attendance is -- when I was a kid I went to around 15 games a year, when I was in college I went to around 4 games a year, when I moved to Seattle I started going to 30+ games a year. My guess is that I'm on the high end, but I'm still stymied by "11-500".

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