Tom Verducci, in a recent article on Bryce Harper, mentions that the Nationals averaged only about 12,000 households viewing each home game last season.

It occurs to me that the Nationals may be the only team in the country where the “fan base” is more likely to go to a game than watch it on TV.  After all, the Nationals to a certain extent positioned their new stadium as a prime location for D.C. power players to have business meetings and discuss the future of our Great Nation.  Of course, the Nationals have not been putting a great product on the field of late, which will diminish any team’s fan base.  But the Nationals’ current path, of increasing respectability borne on the back of several marquee names (Strausberg, Zimmerman, Zimmermann, and now Harper), is precisely the sort of attention-grabbing roster construction that would make an afternoon ballpark business meeting trendy.  Perhaps more than any other city, the Nationals have access to a unique demographic, one with money to spend but questionable rooting interest in the team.

To investigate this, I found stadium attendance and TV ratings from the 2009 season.  The bigger the ratio of game attendance to TV households, the larger the percentage of assumed fan base attends games:

The Nationals were the only team who averaged more fans in the seats than households tuning into the game (the shocking part of this is that their TV ratings were up 67% over 2008).  The Yankees and the Red Sox, as expected, were at the bottom.  The Marlins and Rays both had two different cable networks (FS Florida and SunSports) showing their games, which increased their household viewing numbers.  The Braves’ large number is due to their TBS days and two cable networks (FS South and SportSouth).  The source I used did not have television numbers for the Blue Jays.

There are a couple of factors likely working against the Nationals here.  One is that they are a recently-transplanted franchise which has not had the opportunity to build deep roots in its new city.  The team that arrived in Washington in 2005, and the stadium in which they first played, did them no favors.  Nevertheless, no other team comes even close to the Nationals’ ratio.

I’m no economics major, but these numbers seem to suggest that certain teams are pricing their tickets appropriately.  The Athletics and the Nationals’ average 2009 ticket prices, $24.31 and $30.63 respectively, resulted in the highest ratios of game attendance versus TV audience.  In those cities, it seems, ticket prices are encouraging fans to watch games in person.

There is another interesting aspect to this data.  Much has been written recently about how a new stadium no longer “saves” a team.  Baltimore and Cleveland’s new stadiums in the 1990s ushered in many years of big crowds and increased revenue.  Writers have pointed to Pittsburgh and indeed Washington as examples of how the novelty of a new stadium is wearing off faster these days.

Yet look at Baltimore and Cleveland.  They rank 4th and 9th respectively in ratio of game attendance to television audience.  Their beautiful ballparks are still saving them from an even more precipitous decline in fan base interest.

Sources: 

tv numbers: http://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/article/63798

attendance numbers: http://espn.go.com/mlb/attendance/_/year/2009

A version of this article first appeared on my blog.