The Newsday article linked here is “Mets expect Citi Field attendance to increase in second half.” First the quote then my take….
“I think we can grow attendance regardless, as long as the team is competitive,” DePaoli said. “It doesn’t have to be a 100-win team. It can’t really be a 50-win team . . . We’d like to think even if the team [record] just stayed status quo our attendance is going to go up a little bit by the end of the year.”
via Mets expect Citi Field attendance to increase in second half – Newsday.
I don’t have access to the data they do, but I do have eyes and I am not seeing it.
Now sure if the Fake Pennant Race goes well more people will come out. But to me it sure feels like fewer people are going and less buzz in the ballpark than ever.
A post All Star Game west coast swing has historically been awful for this franchise. That doesn’t mean that it has to be awful this time, but everyone needs to calm the bleep down after one good week. This team was 11 games under .500 ten days ago, so let’s not act like the 1986 Mets are back.
Time will tell, but I will bet a dollar on the Mets kidding themselves and/or Newsday on this one.
You can tell a few things from the data they do let us fans see.
First off, ticket prices are a lot higher than they were early in the season. There were Sunday games early in the season with Prom Reserved prices of $17. Memorial Day Sunday (which ended up being a double header), I was able to get Caesars box seats for $37/ticket. If you look at pricing for weekend games now, they are much higher. That alone suggests that whether or not the Mets are actually selling more tickets, they definitely expect to see much higher demand than early in the season.
The other thing to do is go to the seating chart for an upcoming game and checking seat availability. The ticketing system can filter sections to show which have blocks of seats of a given size available. The more seats have been sold, the harder it will be to find larger blocks of seats for that game. For example, for the Father’s Day game, there was not a single block of 5 seats together in any seating section other than Promenade Reserved or Promenade Outfield, while more recent games have seen such blocks available on the field level.
In the end, the one factor that will do more to sell tickets to casual fans than anything else will be best indicated by the frequency of positive Mets headlines on the back pages of the tabloids. Those of us who follow the team closely may be driven by things like win-loss record, our favorite starting pitchers, and our perception of the team’s prospects. The casual fan just knows that the Mets suck until they regular appearances on the back page convince them otherwise. (The Yankees have momentum working in the opposite direction for the time being. Their team isn’t much better than the Mets, but they’re still trying to get fans to spend 2-3 times as much on comparable tickets. The casual fan thinks the Yankees are good until they learn otherwise. Of course, the Yankees have lots of seats available.)
Remember that no team sells 3 million tickets in a year without selling a lot of them to people who don’t really follow the team so closely. If the Mets get a lot better over the next few years, and the Yankees continue to decline, the bandwagon will get very crowded…