This is Michael Lortz’ fourth piece as part of his June residency at FanGraphs. Lortz covers the Tampa Bay baseball market for the appropriately named Tampa Bay Baseball Market and has previously published work in the Community pages, as well. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of all our residents here.

There’s been a lot of circumstantial and empirical evidence showing winning baseball games has an effect on the amount of tickets purchased in subsequent games. In 2008, Michael Davis of the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri S&T) concluded that team success leads to greater attendance. However, Davis’s study had a huge flaw. He limited his study to “only the ten major league baseball teams that have played in the same city for over 100 years. This list includes five National League teams: the Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates and St. Louis Cardinals; and five American League teams: the Boston Red Sox, Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers and New York Yankees.”

For the sake of determining whether wins matter, that’s way too small of a sample size. Davis might have had enough data points, but his data points were not representative of the wide array of situations with which franchises must contend.

In 2012, Dan Lependorf wrote a post for The Hardball Times concerning the relationship between wins, attendance, and payroll. Whereas Davis went deep in time for a few teams, Lependorf analyzed every team from 2000 to 2011. Lependorf concluded that the relationship between wins and attendance produced an R-squared of .27. There was an even stronger correlation to attendance and wins the previous season (R-squared = .3). Attendance in a season featured an even stronger relationship to attendance level in the previous season (R-squared = .8).

Every sports team in every city will draw at least one fan. In Major League Baseball, we can also guarantee that every team will win at least one game. We can also guarantee a top level of attendance depending on the maximum capacity of the stadium. For the Rays, that would be 40,135 times 81 — or 3,250,935. And, of course, the most wins the Rays can have in the regular season is 162.

Since 1999 (excluding their inaugural season), the Rays have averaged 1.4 million fans and 75 wins per season. They’ve had eight seasons over 75 wins and nine seasons over 1.4 million fans. Since 1999, the correlation between the Rays’ winning percentage and attendance per game produces an R-squared value of .52.

That is almost double the correlation Davis found for teams. So despite the claims that wins don’t matter to attendance in Tampa Bay, they do. To a point.

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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Pedro Gonzalez, CF, Colorado (Profile)
Level: Short Season  Age: 19   Org Rank: 7   Top 100: NR
Line: 4-for-5, 2B, BB, SB, CS
Notes
Gonzalez spent much of extended spring training in the Dominican Republic. Colorado doesn’t have an AZL team, so Gonzalez went directly from the DR to Grand Junction, his second year at that affiliate. Because of this, it has been hard for clubs, even those who place a heavier priority on complex-level scouting, to get eyes on Gonzalez. He remains physically projectable at a lean, broad-shoulder 6-foot-5, 190, and he’s a plus runner under way.

His defensive instincts draw mixed reviews, but he has the speed to stay there and try to polish his routes over time. If he fills out, slows down, and has to move to a corner it probably means he’s grown into enough power to profile there, at which point it will become imperative that he quell his desire to chase breaking balls off the plate.

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This is Michael Lortz’ third piece as part of his June residency at FanGraphs. Lortz covers the Tampa Bay baseball market for the appropriately named Tampa Bay Baseball Market and has previously published work in the Community pages, as well. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of all our residents here.

In my recent interview with Rays President Brian Auld, he stated that a goal of the Rays’ front office was to reach a league-average annual attendance mark. Last year, MLB average attendance was approximately 2.4 million per club. Rays attendance was 47% below that mar. Since Stu Sternberg bought the team in 2005, the Rays have never been close to league average. The closest they’ve been is 23% below in 2009.

Here’s the Rays’ attendance compared to league average since 2006:

And the following table illustrates how far the Rays have been from league average since Sternberg bought the team.

That’s obviously not encouraging. On the other hand, does it make sence for the Rays to set even the modest goal of “average” in a universe that includes major markets such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York? Since 2006, the Dodgers and Yankees, for example, have never been lower than 20% above league average in annual attendance and have been as high as 64% above average. The biggest markets in Major League Baseball skew the average for less populated areas such as Tampa Bay. Those teams would have to severely struggle over an extended amount of time to be anywhere near league average.

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We’re still 100 games away from the end of the season, but we’re getting closer to that time when teams have to decide whether they’re in or out of contention for the playoffs. Some clubs might have to make the tough choice of moving themselves out of contention despite having a reasonable playoff shot. In the American League, nearly every team is still in the race. That might change over the course of the next month, of course, but the field certainly looks like it will still be crowded come July.

There are five playoff spots up for grabs in the AL, and while a lot can and will happen the rest of the way, there are four teams to which our playoff odds give roughly an 80% or better chance of making the playoffs: the Houston Astros, Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, and New York Yankees. The Astros look well on their way to potentially 100 wins, while the Indians, Red Sox and Yankees appear to be moving toward close to 90 wins, a figure that generally amounts to a spot in the postseason. Those four teams total 359% of the 500% total odds available. After that, seven teams have something close to a 10%.

After the first four teams, no club has a better than a 50% chance at the playoffs. The team at the top, Toronto, is currently in last place in its division. Here are the playoff odds since the beginning of the season for the rest of the teams in the American League — with the exception, that is, of the rebuilding Chicago White Sox, who have been near zero all season long.

Does that look like an incomprehensible mess? Well, welcome to the AL Wild Card race. If it helps at all, the list of teams at the bottom of the chart is in order in terms of their current playoff odds. There are seven teams with close to a 1-in-10 shot of making the playoffs, with a couple more in Kansas City and Oakland that possess an outside chance of getting back into the mix. If you picked the top team currently by the odds, Toronto, taking the field is probably a better bet.

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This is Michael Lortz’ second piece as part of his June residency at FanGraphs. Lortz covers the Tampa Bay baseball market for the appropriately named Tampa Bay Baseball Market and has previously published work in the Community pages, as well. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of all our residents here.

According to the old stereotype, Florida is an elephant graveyard where everyone’s retired grandparents go to spend their final years. They drive slow, play bingo on Wednesdays, and clog the roads on the way to their early-bird specials.

The reality, as is frequently the case, is much more complicated.

As I mentioned in my first article, Tampa Bay is a growing region. Not only economically, but also in population. Earlier this year, the Tampa Bay Business Journal reported that the region of Tampa-St Petersburg-Clearwater is expected to top 3 million people by the end of 2017. According to the US census, approximately 330,000 people in Tampa Bay are over 65, or 11% of the population. A significant portion, but far from the majority.

Transplants are a large segment of the Tampa Bay population. In 2014, the New York Times published an article depicting where the population of each state came from. According to the Times, only 36% of Florida residents were natives, 8% were from New York, and 8% were from other Northeast states. We can probably safely assume many of the urban parts of Florida have a higher percentage of non-native Floridians. Which means Tampa Bay may have a higher percentage of transplants than other parts of Florida.

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Brock Burke is on a roll. The 20-year-old southpaw has made nine starts for the Bowling Green Hot Rods, and he hasn’t allowed more than one earned run in any of them. His record is an unblemished 5-0, and his ERA is a sparkling 1.23. He’s been one of the most-dominant under-the-radar pitchers in the minors. Of the 52 A-ball pitchers with at least 50 innings pitched this season, his ERA ranks third.

Burke’s fast start for Tampa Bay’s Low-A affiliate has been partially fueled by Driveline Baseball.

“I came down early and did a weighted-ball camp,” explained Burke, whom the Rays took in the third round of the 2014 draft out of a Denver-area high school. “It was mostly a Driveline program. Our pitching coordinator, Dewey Robinson, invited a bunch of us — it was voluntary — and it was definitely beneficial. It got me in better body shape, which has helped my accuracy and my velo.”

Midwest League hitters have seen firm fastballs from the lefty, but it’s not as though he suddenly morphed into a flamethrower. What’s changed is that his velocity is no longer temperamental. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Michael Lortz’ first piece as part of his June residency at FanGraphs. Lortz covers the Tampa Bay baseball market for the appropriately named Tampa Bay Baseball Market and has previously published work in the Community pages, as well. You can find him on Twitter, as well.

By most accounts, Tampa Bay is a growing region. There is job growth, revenue growth, housing growth, and billions in development happening throughout both Tampa and St. Petersburg. But one number that is not growing, despite an increase in expendable income, is attendance at Tropicana Field.

Fortunately, the main reasons why the Rays continue to struggle at the gate have become somewhat well known. Most knowledgeable Tampa Bay residents and baseball fans know Tropicana Field is too far from the population center and the gridlock too tangled for enough fans to see the Rays on a daily basis. This media appears to have become aware of these particular challenges: we’ve seen fewer national editorials of late blaming the Rays’ fanbase for lack of attendance. There’s still the occasional tweet, but published commentary criticizing Tampa Bay sports fans for lack of Rays attendance is rare.

Regardless of how often the problem is covered, there aren’t many articles offering solutions. That is a problem. From the outsider’s perspective, it seems the Rays are running out of ideas to get people to the ballpark. While they can only put so much lipstick on the pig that is Tropicana Field, they’ve altered prices, involved their people in the community, and offered a smorgasbord of various promotions with varying results.

The lack of attendance is putting the Rays in a bind: without revenue from attendance and with lower-than-average broadcast revenue, they have to rely on revenue sharing to stay competitive in one of the more affluent divisions in baseball. And there’s skepticism from baseball owners and front-office personnel throughout the sport as to whether Tampa Bay can ever be a successful major-league market — despite the fact that four franchises spring train in Tampa Bay, two others train just over an hour away, and four minor-league teams call the region home.

At my website, I’ve covered Rays attendance since 2007, the last year the Rays had the Devil in their name. Over the history of the franchise (excluding the inaugural season), there have been four different eras of Rays attendance.

• 1999-2007: The Phantom Ownership (avg 1.3 million)
• 2008-2010: A New Fandom (avg 1.8 million)
• 2011-2013: Indifference Strikes Back (avg 1.5 million)
• 2014-Present: Return of the Empty Seats (avg 1.3 million)

As you can see, even with more recognition and more active ownership, the Rays now draw as many people to Tropicana Field as they did during the Dewon Brazelton years. That’s not a good thing.

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Even though the Rays lost on Tuesday, they’re still hanging around, with a higher number of wins than losses. The pitching staff, overall, has been neither good nor bad, which I suppose is what you’d expect from a roughly .500 ballclub. Something a little more surprising might be that the Rays have been baseball’s second-best baserunning team. And even bigger than that, the Rays presently rank fifth in team wRC+, between the Dodgers and the Reds. The Rays have struck out, but they’ve still scored runs, with the team very much a legitimate wild-card contender.

If you want to talk about the Rays offense, you should give some attention to Logan Morrison. Once you’re done doing that, you should give further attention to Steven Souza Jr. And once you’re done doing that, you should give the rest of your attention to Corey Dickerson. Dickerson’s been the best hitter on the team, and he’s also been one of the very best hitters in the league, placing just behind Bryce Harper in wRC+. The Rays have known for a while that Dickerson is a pure and talented hitter, but so far he’s made the most of his skills. We should discuss those skills. Dickerson’s is a highly unusual offensive skillset.

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When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

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As a FanGraphs reader, you’re presumably familiar with the TTO acronym. Just in case you’re not, TTO stands for Three True Outcomes, and said three true outcomes are walks, strikeouts, and homers. They’re the outcomes least likely to lie to you; they’re the outcomes that tell you the most about the individuals involved. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that there are more strikeouts now than ever before. You also know that home-run rates have taken off. So this plot should fit with what you’d figure. Viewing over an entire century of baseball, you see league-wide TTO% taking flight.

This season, a third of all plate appearances have ended with either a walk, a strikeout, or a homer. As recently as 1992, it was more like a quarter of all plate appearances. It was a fifth of all plate appearances in 1946. The image there speaks for itself, so I suppose I don’t need to address it any longer. The trends are up, is the point. There’s no sign of this pattern changing course.

Recently, the Effectively Wild podcast received a listener email, asking how high is too high. That is, how high could TTO% go before the game just feels all weird and broken? I didn’t have a good answer. I’m unconvinced the average fan cares about this as much as analysts do. We’re the ones who need stuff to write about, while the average fan just wants to know if a given team is winning or losing. Here’s one thing I can say: The future might look like the Rays. Nobody else TTOs quite like the Rays do.

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