MLB Attendance

Introduction

The question I want to answer is what affects attendance for Major League Baseball teams. Over the last few years there has been lots fo talk about the attendance of Major League Baseball games. The attendance had gone down every year in the MLB from 2012-2021. However, the last two years have seen a spike in attendance. Instead of focusing on the league as a whole, I wanted to look at each teams attendance and see what kind of things might have affected their 2023 attendance.

Analysis

To answer this question I first scraped MLB attendance data from ESPN and joined this data with MLB batting and pitching data from MLB.com. This created a dataframe comprised of 2023 attendance for each team as well as some statistics that could have impacted this attendance. I plan to make graphs for five of these stats and their relationship with each team’s average attendance in 2023.

Attendance by Wins

This graph shows the relationship between the amount of wins a team had in 2023 and their average attendance for home games. From the graph it is evident that there is a positive relationship between Wins and average attendance. There are some teams who have less wins and have more average attendance than more successful teams, but overall winning more games results in getting more attendance. One big outlier is Tampa Bay. In 2023, Tampa Bay had one of the best records in the MLB and were also bottom 5 in average attendance. This is due to many reasons, but Tampa Bay’s stadium, Tropicana field is considered one of the worst venues in the MLB. The Rays plan to combat this and in September announced plans for a new $1.3 billion Stadium. The team with the least amount of wins, Oakland, also had the lowest average attendance.

Attendance by Runs Scored

This graph shows the relationship of the amount of Runs a team scored in 2023 and their average attendance for home games. From the graph, again it is evident that there is a positive relationship between amount of runs scored and attendance. In fact their was only one team that scored less than 700 runs who were top half in attendance which is the Yankees who are one of the biggest franchises in all of sports. The team who scored the most Runs the Dodgers also had the highest average attendance and the team who score the least runs, Oakland, had the least average attendance.This graph shows the relationship of the amount of Runs a team scored in 2023 and their average attendance for home games. From the graph, again it is evident that there is a positive relationship between amount of runs scored and attendance. In fact their was only one team that scored less than 700 runs who were top half in attendance which is the Yankees who are one of the biggest franchises in all of sports. The team who scored the most Runs the Dodgers also had the highest average attendance and the team who score the least runs, Oakland, had the least average attendance.

Attendance by Home Runs

This graph shows the relationship of the number of home runs a team hit in 2023 and their average attendance for home games. From the graph there is a slight positive relationship between home runs and attendance, but I would not say this relationship is significant. Although generally, teams with less home runs had less attendance, there are a lot of exceptions. Out of the six teams who hit more than 225 home runs, only two of them are in the top ten of average attendance. Also Cleveland had the least amount of home runs and were not in the bottom five in terms of attendance.

Attendance by Earned Run Average

This is graph shows the relationship between a team’s earned run average in 2023, and their average attendance for home games. From the graph there is a slight relationship between ERA and attendance.That being said I think this is more to do with teams with lower ERA tend to win more games. ERA alone does not appear to be significantly related to attendance. Colorado had the highest ERA and were top half of teams in terms of attendance. Milwaukee also had the lowest ERA and were only 15th in attendance.

Attendance by If Team Made the Playoffs

This is graph shows the relationship between if a team made the playoffs in 2023 and their average home attendance. From the graph there does not appear to be a significant relationship between making the playoffs and attendance. Although the teams who made the playoffs had a higher average attendance it is not by much. Also out of the top four teams in terms of attendance, only one made the playoffs. Out of the bottom four teams in terms of attendance, two of them made the playoffs.