Josh Donaldson Says Minnesota Fans “Don’t Even Care” About Baseball

[lukeduke1980]

'Minnesotan fans don't care about mediocre baseball' fixes it for me.  Summer is too precious and the mediocrity has become too prevalent 

[JD-TWINS]

8 hours ago, ashbury said:

I'm glad you pointed out Cincy.  They're an important example and no theory is complete without taking it into account.  (Whatever "theory" I have is half-formed and less than half-baked anyway.)

I pulled up a table (shown below) comparing W-L rankings versus attendance rankings across the last 20 seasons.  There is indeed a very strong correlation between winning and attendance.  The Reds happen to fit exactly to that pattern - 21st in winning percentage, 21st in attendance.

Statisticians always warn that correlation is not causation. You can say "build a winning team and the fans will come."  I could be contrary, given a century-plus of baseball history to build on, and put it the other way around to say that if a city supports its team they'll be rewarded with winners.  The truth?  Possibly somewhere in between.  What I don't like about "win and they will come" is that it's awfully transactional - "we give you this and you give this to us in return" - when pro sports are (or should be) about love and excitement instead.

Also, attendance is not the only measure of fan engagement, and neither is equivalent to team profitability.  I mention this just to keep clear the limitations of trying to do an amateur study.

Anyhoo, the blue and red symbols in the table highlight the biggest outliers.  Despite consistent winning teams the past two decades, Cleveland hasn't supported the Guardians.  It's interesting if Cleveland fans will travel southwest to watch their team play an interleague game but not attend at home. (Yes, I know, Ohio is very regional so we're talking about Dayton and Columbus fans and so forth.)   I'm sure MLB has been studying their situation for years, and would have a solution if there was one.  FWIW that home-attendance history flies in the face of my one bit of anecdotal evidence - I went to a game in Cleveland late last month and the Friday night crowd (against the non-bitter-rival Diamondbacks) was large and enthusiastic - remaining so even in the final innings after an 8th inning bullpen meltdown. 

The Phillies and Rockies are the biggest ones in the other direction.  Philadelphia is a large city and they're quirky so that one doesn't interest me too much as anything the Twins could learn from. But what eldritch magic does the Colorado FO have that pulls fans in to see the woeful product they put on the field?  That needs to be bottled and shared.

Have to mention the Brewers of course.  They also demonstrate you don't have to win to draw.

Back to Donaldson's point about the Minnesota Twins - the Twin Cities do not shine in this table.  The team is 15th in wins, but only 18th in attendance.  They are not as bad about this as the Athletics or Rays, but then again you don't want to be mentioned in the same breath with basket cases.  No table is going to give a good picture of the atmosphere at the ballyard - in my experience Red Sox fans lean forward and shout "we're here to have fun," while Twins fans sit back and say "entertain me."

I'm sure there is much more to be gleaned than I mentioned, but I don't plan to make this into a big undertaking for myself.  Here is the table.  Thanks for the nudge.

 

attendance rank compared with the winning-percentage rank:

Team	W–L % rank	Attendance rank	Difference	Attendance / win*
Dodgers	1	1	0	~38,500
Yankees	2	2	0	~33,400
Red Sox	3	4	+1	~32,900
Cardinals	4	3	−1	~35,100
Braves	5	10	+5	~28,700
Guardians	6	29	+23 🔴	~20,100
Astros	7	13	+6	~28,500
Rangers	8	12	+4	~29,200
Giants	9	8	−1	~31,600
Angels	10	9	−1	~31,200
Cubs	11	6	−5	~32,600
Mets	12	5	−7	~33,500
Tigers	13	15	+2	~28,900
Blue Jays	14	14	0	~29,200
Twins	15	18	+3	~27,600
Mariners	16	16	0	~28,200
Athletics	17	25	+8	~23,800
Padres	18	11	−7	~30,500
Diamondbacks	19	22	+3	~26,100
Phillies	20	7	−13 🔵	~33,700
Reds	21	21	0	~26,700
Nationals	22	24	+2	~25,100
Brewers	23	17	−6	~28,800
Rays	24	28	+4	~22,500
Orioles	25	23	−2	~26,500
White Sox	26	19	−7	~28,700
Pirates	27	27	0	~24,300
Marlins	28	30	+2	~19,400
Royals	29	26	−3	~25,000
Rockies	30	20	−10 🔵	~29,000

The winning % equates to what range of time? Last year? Last 5 years? Last 25 years?

The Giants haven’t been #9 in winning % for a bit & the Brewers at 23rd in winning% seems really outdated.

Can’t blend down years with good years and draw any conclusions that relate to specific years of winning & specific years of drawing well or not.

Rays 24th in winning%???

[ashbury]

13 minutes ago, JD-TWINS said:

The winning % equates to what range of time? Last year? Last 5 years? Last 25 years?

The Giants haven’t been #9 in winning % for a bit & the Brewers at 23rd in winning% seems really outdated.

Can’t blend down years with good years and draw any conclusions that relate to specific years of winning & specific years of drawing well or not.

Rays 24th in winning%???

I thought I stated, but it was across 20 years.  Trying to rule out small sample sizes, and thereby derive some kind of big-picture about the behavior of the respective markets, but of course the details of season-to-season matter too.  I suppose that's why consulting firms rake in the big bucks.

[JD-TWINS]

12 minutes ago, ashbury said:

I thought I stated, but it was across 20 years.  Trying to rule out small sample sizes, and thereby derive some kind of big-picture about the behavior of the respective markets, but of course the details of season-to-season matter too.  I suppose that's why consulting firms rake in the big bucks.

Stating the obvious here - if a team has 3 deep playoff runs in 20 years and makes the playoffs 3 other times…….that’s 14 years of OK to Bad ………….6-7 of those 14 years can be assumed to be Bad. The winning and attendance are generally in lock step…,,,towns like St. Louis come out regardless …….but, as the Team that’s won 2nd most World Series, there’s a pretty solid case of winning tradition to overcome the lulls.

[HarmonK03]

15 hours ago, olerud said:

 Donaldson--"Everything analytics no reasoning." I 100% agree with his assessment about that time period of the management!!!!!!

Nothing has changed from that regard.

[chpettit19]

8 hours ago, IndianaTwin said:

I’ll look forward to the series and I’m sure you’ll cover this then, but how many trips did you do? Lots of one-offs or were you able to string a lot together?

It'll end up being 6 trips total.

[LastOnePicked]

22 hours ago, Seth Stohs said:

Rocco and Falvey and the team and the clubhouse must have cared the year before he got there when they won 101 games. 

Cool. What happened next?

I don't want to be a jerk, but that's kinda the crux of it. They really haven't won anything significant in a very long time. And they don't seem to be able to capitalize on an open window. They're a mid-tier organization at best.

Donaldson is only saying what many of us already believe.

[knothole61]

13 hours ago, sampleSizeOfOne said:

It's just an old children's book i read as a kid, I suppose i could have also selected any number of Theodor Geisel publications, or also Mike mulligan's steam shovel, "are you my mother?", or if slightly older demographic, Frank Baum or the Mother Westwind series. But the ball seemed to fit with baseball, if not explicitly, and when joined TD and selected the avatar, i had relatively recently taken up playing tuba. So it seemed an appropriate if obscure reference. (and in some fashion, obscurity is a bonus) but it did seem doubly appropriate during the era where we wrote game thread intros, and i tried to pick up the slack, and it so happened that i was in a parade that day, and hurriedly typing something up while waiting for step off.

 

Thanks for asking.

Thanks...now there's one less mystery in my life.

I enjoyed the reference to L. Frank Baum. As you probably know, in the novel Dorothy wears silver, not ruby slippers, and some believe that the book was intended as a Populist political allegory. This has nothing to do with baseball of course, but Baum fascinates me.  

[dcswede]

Look what we Twins fans have been willing to accept for the last 30 years. Donaldson is a jerk - but he's not wrong.