In a piece today about how the Washington Nationals' TV ratings are up this year, the Washington Post supplies a damning measurement of the franchise's unpopularity:
Even importing one warm body from every household that's tuning into to an average broadcast and adding that person to the existing average crowd would not fill Nationals Park; no other franchise faces a similar situation. In the Washington market, even the Baltimore Orioles (with a 0.75 rating) out-draw the Nationals.
How could anyone have foreseen that stealing the Montreal Expos would be such a failure? In 2002, for Washington City Paper, I consulted the historical record:
Here's how the longest-lived Senators, the 1901-1960 version, ranked in attendance in their last 10 years in the eight-team American League, before they pulled up the bases and went off to be the Minnesota Twins: sixth, sixth, sixth, seventh, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth.
Is that because the Senators were moribund by then, their fans put off by 50-some years of losing? Here's where their attendance ranked at the dawn of the century, in the first 10 years of the American League: fifth, seventh, eighth, eighth, seventh, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth, seventh.
...
The Senators were unpopular when they were good (eight winning seasons between 1924 and 1933), and they were unpopular when they were bad. They were unpopular in a crumbling old ballpark and in a pair of brand-new ones. They were unpopular in war and in peace, in the depths of the Depression and in the postwar boom. Only once, when the G.I.s came home in 1946, did they top 1 million in attendance--and that still only ranked fifth in the league.
Montreal, by comparison, was a baseball hotbed.
When I was doing the piece, the Orioles told me that at their games, the no-show rate among people who'd bought tickets was about 20 percent, and that other teams were getting similar results. When I asked Major League Baseball for a complete set of no-show figures, the commissioner's office denied that any such figures existed at all. According to an MLB spokesperson, despite the fact that all the clubs kept a count of tickets sold and all the clubs had turnstiles at the gates, no one was subtracting the turnstile count from the ticket count and recording the difference. Really. Even though the Orioles had read to me from a list of those figures. That was what the commissioner's office said. The Orioles' version of things seemed more plausible, and more worrisome:
What the no-show rate says is that a rise in fandom isn't what's driving baseball's latest boom. Pundits worry that another strike might break the hearts of children and make dedicated fans stopped going to the ballpark. But baseball could see an overnight 20 percent drop in the gate if the people who already skip games merely stop buying tickets. The game is on the bubble along with everyone else.
