Greinke's effect on attendance

Sam Mellinger of the Kansas City Star suggested on his blog a novel idea of the Royals having a Greinke ticket plan. It's a good idea, even with the clear logistical problems (which he mentions). However, one thing he said gave me a moment to pause:

"We ran numbers last summer, and with a few exceptions, the “Greinke bump” in ticket sales wasn’t quite what you might expect."

Now, "what you might expect" is clearly very open to interpretation but the suggestion is that Greinke starting didn't have much of an effect on attendance. So I decided to dig into the numbers. Here is a quick line chart of every home games attendance. Greinke starts are highlighted in red.


So it looks like Greinke's starts are in most cases high points, but some are oddly low points, especially that game early in the season. But lets get into that later. So what were the average attendance of home games with and without Greinke?

In Greinke's 17 starts: 24,707
In the other 63* games: 21,871

* On Tuesday July 2st the Royals staged a double header to makeup a game. The attendance of game 1 is officially 0, but there were more than 0 people there, so I just ignored that game.

So Greinke starts averaged 2,836 more people or a 13% increase. Clearly a noticeable difference. Is that all atributalbe to Greinke though?

Greinke had 4 of the 13 Friday starts at home in 2009. Considering he is only one of 5 pitchers he clearly got a little lucky in that Friday is a great attendance night. So how did Greinke's Friday starts compare to the rest of the Fridays at home?

Greinke's 4 starts: 34,647
Other 13 Fridays: 28,991

That is a 20% increase in attendance, but it is a relatively small sample size. Still, the numbers indicate that Greinke has an even better pull on Fridays, and the Royals got lucky to have him out there 4 times. I didn't think initially there would be this big of a spread, but it does make sense that his pull with casual fans who are more likely to attend on a Friday is pretty obvious. But that should also be the case on Saturday, right?

Greinke's 3 Saturdays: 27,578
Other 10 Saturdays: 31,178

This time Greinke seems to have a negative effect, but looking at the data two of his three starts took place in August and September, when fan interest as a whole drops off.

The oddest game of the year Attendance wise has to be Monday, April 13th. It was only the teams 4th home game and the attendance was 9,967 and it was Greinke's first home start of the season. On the next day the attendance was 11,663, so why was the attendance so lowsy? The weather on that day seems pretty normal, it was 43 degrees and it wasn't raining. I guess it might have been some fatigue from the home opening weekend. Also, fans were not yet fully on the Greinke bandwagon, at that point he was a fantastic pitcher but not yet the best pitcher in baseball. But still, that is a pretty big outlier in the Grienke attendance average. If we remove that game from his average, it jumps up nearly 1,000 people per game.

It is pretty clear that Greinke was a big draw to the ballpark in 2009. With some crude math, I estimated that Greinke drew about 48,212 people to the park. I would conservatively estimate that the Royals can net an average of $20 per person, which is about $964,240 in revenue from Greinke alone. Not bad for a guy who made about $3.7m.

Since a Greinke home start is worth an additional $56,000 by my estimation, the Royals would probably do well to try and find a way to get him a couple more home starts by resting him an extra day here and there, or shortening his rest.

In conclusion, I do agree with Mellinger that the Royals could certainly do very well by selling a Zack Pack up front. Money up front is ALWAYS better to have, plus you lock people into his starts. But as to whether the attendance bump is or is not what I think. I have to say it was about what I thought.