When the Houston Astros signed free agent Roger Clemens last winter, the subsequent blitz for tickets was so overwhelming that members of the club’s ticket sales department could not make outgoing calls for three days.
Several months later and many miles north, a mid-May matchup between Toronto’s Cy Young Award winner Roy Halladay and Boston ace Pedro Martinez coincided with a promotion offering Blue Jays fans $2 tickets. The fortuitous timing prompted a Toronto columnist to question the sanity of anyone who did not attend the game, which drew more than 30,000 people despite conflicting with Game 7 of a Toronto-Ottawa NHL playoff series.
Untitled Document | Making their pitch |
| Boston’s Bronson Arroyo tops the list among MLB starting pitchers for how much bigger the average crowd size has been for his road starts compared with when his team plays a road game and he does not start. Similarly, Montreal’s Claudio Vargas has seen more people in the stands for his home starts compared with other Expos home dates than any other MLB starter has seen relative to his team’s other home games. |
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| For a rundown of the attendance trends for all 96 pitchers with at least seven road starts through July 5 and all 101 pitchers with at least seven home starts through that date, click here. |
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| Click image to enlarge |
The notion that fans flock to see the league’s best arms is generally accepted by many team marketing executives, who have been known to alter promotions based on pitching matchups.
“We definitely started highlighting pitching matchups in our print and radio ads,” said Andrew Huang, the Astros’ vice president of marketing.
Attendance figures for the first half of the 2004 season show the effect a big-name hurler can have at the gate. The 10 starting pitchers with the biggest impact on their clubs’ road attendance through July 5 include Cy Young Award winners Clemens and Martinez along with other such high-profile starters as Oakland’s Mark Mulder and Atlanta’s Mike Hampton.
But for every Pedro and Roger there’s a Bronson and a C.C.
Strong attendance trend lines for Bronson Arroyo, C.C. Sabathia and other lesser-known starters suggest that factors such as the day of the week or a creative promotion can get fans to the ballpark as much as that day’s pitcher.
The Red Sox’s Arroyo leads all pitchers in road attendance effect, seeing 33 percent more fans on the road for his starts than his team has drawn on days he does not pitch. Meanwhile, established stars such as Tom Glavine, Curt Schilling and Greg Maddux have failed to drive up attendance significantly, if at all, on the days they start. Consider further that Mulder ranks second while Barry Zito, his Cy Young Award-winning teammate with the colorful personality, actually has pitched before smaller crowds on the road than his A’s teammates.
That Zito is scuffling this season while Mulder is producing all-star number might be a factor, but a bigger influence likely is that seven of Mulder’s eight road starts through July 5 were against attendance powerhouses like the Yankees, Angels and Giants. Zito also made eight road starts during that period, but it wasn’t against the same line-up of MLB attendance leaders.
In the case of Schilling, the Boston hurler has seen his starts have a 23 percent lower average attendance on the road than other Boston road games. Only two of his eight road starts through July 5, however, had come on the weekend, and one of those games was against lowly Kansas City. Conversely, four of list-topper Arroyo’s seven road starts had fallen on a Saturday or Sunday, including starts at Yankee Stadium and San Francisco’s SBC Park.
A pitcher’s effect on home attendance appears even less linked to his ability, largely because most teams with dominant pitching staffs have good teams that sell out consistently, leaving little room for fluctuation. That eliminates from consideration the star-studded staffs of teams like the Red Sox, Yankees and Cubs. What’s left are pitchers on clubs with plenty of empty seats — such as Halladay and the Blue Jays.
It all leaves club marketing experts to take nothing for granted in a world saturated with entertainment options. Noting that on a recent Sunday the Blue Jays’ Ted Lilly, the club’s hottest pitcher, was going to face Arizona’s Randy Johnson, the Jays’ marketing staff mobilized.
“On top of that, the game was not going to be televised,” said Toronto marketing director Jim Bloom. “So we saw that [matchup] coming and we marketed it.”
