Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 35: Is Coors Field to Blame for the Rockies’ Struggles?/Are Fans at Fault When Teams Don’t Draw?

Episode Date: September 5, 2012

Ben and Sam consider whether the ballpark might be to blame for the Rockies’ lackluster first two decades, then discuss the annual phenomenon of attendance shaming.

Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here? Good morning, and welcome to... Good morning. Whoa. Oh, sorry, I thought you were talking to me. Wow. Alright, let's keep going. Welcome to episode 35 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives daily podcast. Back in boring old New York, New York, I am Ben Lindberg.

And in Long Beach, California, and it sounds like with the door open, no, the door closed in his Honda Fit because I don't hear any crickets. It is Sam Miller. The door is open. Crickets are quiet because we're recording in the morning. That's exactly right. Okay. All right.

So this is kind of a new sound for the podcast. Good morning, Sam. I'm saying it to you this time. Good morning. How are you? I'm good. How was your flight? It was nice.

I slept almost the whole way, which was not enough sleep, but it was some sleep. I mean, goodness gracious, what time did that flight leave? That flight left Vancouver at 10.50 p.m. and arrived in New York around 7 a.m. Okay, yeah. Okay. What is your topic? The Colorado Rockies. Okay. And my topic is attendance shaming okay um uh interesting can't wait to hear that one uh sounds like we have a great show lined up you won't have to wait long i will start um the

rockies i uh i think this is the first time that we've done this i'm gonna cheat a little bit and use a topic that i wrote about for today um but not entirely the rockies of course are doing their four-man rotation experiment although over the last month or i guess three weeks they've actually been doing a five-man rotation with the same pitch restrictions on their pitchers which is an interesting premise um but anyway the point is that the rockies are once again trying something a bit, I don't know, they have a plan, they have an idea, they have a reform, they are reforming. And I have to admit, it snuck up on me.

I did not realize until I looked last night, I didn't realize just how unsuccessful the Rockies franchise has been. I mean, I have always had a sense that they've not been a great, successful franchise. But they have – this is their 20th year of existence. They have still not won the NL West. They have twice in their history won more than 83 games, which blew me away. They've won 84 or more games twice, and they've never won more than 92.

And so just, I don't know, I guess I just wanted to talk a little bit about that. As a franchise, they have really never put together, even though they made the World Series, and I'm not taking that away from them, and they seem to have a pretty good team coming together a couple years ago. They haven't really figured out a way to win, and I don't know if you think that it's because of Coors Field, or if it's just not a well-run franchise. or if it's just not a well-run franchise. And I don't know if you think that the four-man rotation has a future, or if this is just another in a long line of reforms that have gone through Colorado every two or three years since the mid-'90s. Well, I guess it's tempting to tie it to Coors Field, and people have done that,

and I guess even the Rockies have kind of done that, whether directly or indirectly, by experimenting with their pitching this year because things weren't working. I mean, I guess over that same span, the Rockies are not the least successful team. Probably maybe fourth? Yeah, right. Okay, so there are worse teams, so I don't know that you can say it's definitely the park. I don't know.

I mean, it's the most extreme park effect place, I guess, and it seems to be a place where players are affected physically. It's not just their numbers, but it could possibly be their recovery time or how their stuff actually moves if they're a pitcher and how effective that is. And I don't know. I guess it's, I don't know if it's unique,

but it's certainly unusual in the sense that it's not just the dimensions of the ballpark that kind of are responsible for those park effects but actual physical effects whether it's movement on pitches or speed on pitches or recovery time for players so i think that could be a factor certainly certainly. I wouldn't say it's definitely Coors, though. Yeah, I don't know. I've always actually kind of been a little bit surprised that it hasn't been tied more closely to Coors

because I know that when a team goes into Colorado, it just feels like they get destroyed. Their bullpen gets destroyed. And, you know, baseball, pitching and baseball are such, I don't know, oftentimes it's so much about attrition. And so it seems like if you were stacking three or four series at Coors Field on top of each other, it would destroy you. And yet the Rockies, I don't know, that doesn't seem to be their issue. Their issue has, it seems to me, been more about their starting than their relief usage.

than their relief usage, but I don't know. It's hard to isolate the effects of the park on a team that just hasn't really been very good, and it's that way for all analysis of Rockies. It's hard to really tie down how good their offense is. I mean, you look at a guy like Carlos Gonzalez, or you look at a lot of their players and a typical park adjusted stat doesn't seem to do them justice because the home road splits are so much more extreme and you wonder if park adjusted stats don't quite reflect the benefit that they get from playing in course field and so you always wonder whether some of these guys aren't even as good as we think they are,

even once we do the math. I don't know. The Rockies. It's weird. It can be an advantage for them, too, of course, in that they are acclimated to that altitude where other teams or other players are not and have to come in and adjust to that quickly. that quickly uh i mean do you think that extreme environments whether it's one way or another pitching favor or or hitting favor do you think they tend to help a team because they can just kind of tailor their ballpark or tailor their team to the ballpark, whether we're talking about cores or Petco or, or whatever it is, do you think having an extreme offensive environment kind of enables

a team to get an edge in the abstract or is it better to just kind of be average and not have to deal with any craziness? Yeah, you would think it would. I mean, it seems natural that it would. And I think that there's probably a sense overall that that is true more for pitching parks than hitting parks. And that might just be our biases because there's a certain elegance to a low offense park that you don't really get in the crazy parks like Coors Field. But if you look at the home field advantages that each franchise has had over the course of many years, there doesn't really seem to be much correlation between, at least when I looked at it, I didn't look at it super well, but when I looked at it maybe a year or two ago, there didn't seem to be a real correlation between type of ballpark or extremity

of ballpark or really anything else there were not a lot of strong correlations running throughout it seems to be kind of a mixed mixed bag although I don't know maybe attendance is probably the best the best factor and you get good attendance usually by winning and it just so happens that the teams with the most extreme parks haven't won a whole lot lately there's one other thing about the um the rockies what they're doing that has kind of gone under the radar but might actually be the most radical part of this season for them and that kind of ties back to something we talked about which is that they have actually moved a member of their front office into their clubhouse. I'll mispronounce the name, but his name is Bill Gevitt or something along those lines. And he has a desk now into a

conference room in the Rockies clubhouse and is handling some of the managerial duties and actually gave a speech to the players a couple of weeks ago, which the response, as I read it, was like everything was great about what he said, but also it was kind of weird to have him talking to them. And so that'll be an interesting thing to see moving forward, whether they break down the traditional divide between front office and clubhouse. That could be a very radical shift. structuring of the front office in that Dan O'Dowd remained the general manager, but sort of had a lot of the general manager's typical duties taken away from him, or at least, I mean, the way

it was portrayed, it was that he, it was almost his idea or something, but it seemed kind of unlikely that that was the case. I mean, at first I thought maybe it was a reflection of the fact that the general manager's job is getting too big for any one person. And maybe we'll start to see those responsibilities get kind of divided among a few people and that this could be the way the game is going. But then based on the response from most people to that news, it seemed like it was just more of a demotion than anything for O'Dowd. And it wasn't really a way to kind of optimize how a team is run so much as it was to optimize how that particular team is run because the guy running it maybe wasn't doing the best job. But they are definitely trying a lot of interesting experiments this year. I just realized that about two minutes ago I made a comment about their attendance, and I missed the opportunity to segue that into your topic.

So I apologize to the segue fans that we have in our audience. Okay. So it's September, and there are a lot of close races and there are some teams still not drawing particularly well so that means it's it's high time for attendance shaming which is what c angie uh who has written for baseball prospectus and writes for the platoon advantage uh termed this phenomenon recently um and and what she was basically pointing to was was the tendency for there to be a lot of hand-wringing and a lot of finger pointing when teams that are competing don't draw so well

um and of course this is just kind of an easy column for someone who's looking for a column is, you know, to kind of shame the fan base for not coming out and supporting a team. And that is less interesting to me, I think, than when the players do it. And there have been a couple examples of that lately. I remember most notably in 2010 when the Rays were, I think, had clinched already and were playing for home field advantage late in September and drew something like 12,000 fans. And after the game, Evan Longoria and David Price kind of called out Rays fans and Longoria called the attendance embarrassing and disheartening and and Price also called it embarrassing on Twitter uh and so in response to that the Rays management just gave away 20,000 tickets it hadn't sold yet uh for I think the last home game of the season or one of the last, the home finale, um, kind of, they said it was something they were considering already, but it was really sort of a, uh, sort of a PR move because people weren't thrilled about those comments. So now we've seen

a couple more players do this recently on August August 30th, Adam Jones tweeted, just heard that we drew around 47K for four games against the first place White Sox. And then he said, um, okay, with many M's and many O's. and then I guess last night also on Twitter Chipper Jones said come on Atlanta the TED was a morgue tonight we need you in full force we feed off you guys no excuse for the loss just saying and you'd think Chipper Jones has been in Atlanta for long enough to not expect the greatest attendance from Braves fans. But I don't know. I mean, do you think that players are better off keeping quiet about this? Are they kind of justified when they play hard all season and their team is successful and the fans don't show up in saying something? Or really, is it just kind of better for them not to tell people

how to spend their money and shame people for not coming to see the play and and really it can only hurt a team and its kind of relationship to the the fan base uh i don't think it probably hurts the team i um i think first off though i mean when you think about it 11 000 people is a lot of people if you know i mean it's not relative to the number of seats that they built but if you and i charged people uh 35 for this podcast i just don't think we would get 11,000 listeners. Do we need to start shaming our, our non-existent listeners? That's the thing that's weird to me about these. Um, whenever this happens is that there are two people, um, that you could be talking to. If you're, um, Adam Jones or David Price or whatever, you'd be talking to the guy who showed up,

in which case, shut up. That guy paid his money. He did it. Or you could be talking to the guy who showed up, in which case, shut up, that guy paid his money. He did it. Or you could be talking to the guy who didn't show up who just doesn't want to go. It's not, like, why should he want to go if he doesn't want to go? I mean, I didn't go to the Rays game last night. I mean, it would be absurd for David Price

to get mad at me for not going to the Rays game. It was not worth my effort to go to a Rays game. What if you're a hardcore Rays fan? If I'm a hardcore Rays fan and the value of a ticket is worth more than $35 to me, then I'll go. And if it's not, then I won't. I mean it seems like a pretty simple calculus that people are capable of making in their lives. And so I don't think that there's any sincere reason to shame fans. On the other hand, I don't really take any of this all that sincerely. I think that it's fine to try to kind of motivate people to come out.

I mean, you make a sell. They're trying to make a sell to people. And they're saying it's a good experience, and you're part of the team, and we need you because you're important. And that's all kind of probably a little bit of marketing. And I mean not officially because I don't think that Adam Jones is taking orders from the Orioles marketing department. But, I mean, it's just a sense of trying to motivate people to come get your product. It's not original, and it's fine with me. I mean, they're not, as far as I can tell, actually rounding up Orioles fans who don't go to games and shooting them in a public square.

That would be unacceptable attendance shaming. Or at least publicly, passive-aggressively tweeting at them. I wonder how many people would show up for the execution of Orioles fans who didn't go to games if they held them in Camden Yards. Adam Jones would be there. The Braves drew almost 17,000 last night. They've averaged just a little bit over 29,000 this year,

which is right in the middle of the pack. 16th out of 30 teams. You didn't even mention the A's, who had 11,000 for a game against the Angels last night. Yeah, well, have you been to the Coliseum? Yeah, I don't think it's that bad, but

I mean, I guess i'm alone there yeah well i mean still though i also don't i think that when i was i the the quality of the ballpark has almost no impact on whether i want to go to a game or not so um that's just a personal thing i either want to watch the baseball game or I don't. You're a purist. Yeah, I just don't really pay that much attention to the amenities once the game starts. But I guess that's just me and I don't hold it against any – I really just have a hard time holding it against anybody for not wanting to spend their money on things that they don't like enough. enough. Many, many episodes of Up and In ago, when Price and Longoria made those comments, there was a rousing debate between Kevin and Jonah Carey, who was the guest, and Jonah was very much opposed to those comments, and kind of for similar reasons, just, you know, objecting to the idea that anyone should be obligated to spend money on a baseball game.

Whereas Kevin really liked the comments because he felt that Price was right, that it was embarrassing that no one was there and that he was just telling the truth and that no one should blame him for telling the truth. and that no one should blame him for telling the truth. I guess, in a way, it is embarrassing if you can't draw fans to a competitive game. And if you're not exactly calling out those fans, it's maybe... I don't know, I guess it's how you say it. If you do an Adam Jones, um, okay, that's a little different from exhorting people to come out because you like having a lot of people there but again who are you who is this message supposed to

land on the people who are there are going to think he's not talking to them and the people who aren't there are going to be unmoved by right no one's going to read that tweet and reconsider their ballpark attendance policies. The A's in 1989 and 1990, the A's were second in the American League in attendance. That's interesting to me. I mean, there's a lot of obvious reasons for that, but it's still interesting. Maybe they should – have they thought about moving maybe? You'd think they would have concerted it. You would.

Yeah. Okay. So if we don't draw at least let's say 10,000 listeners to this podcast, we will be passive aggressively tweeting later about the lack of support from the internet. It's going to be extremely passive. You won't even be able to tell it's about this. So really look hard for the message. And we will be back regardless of how many people listen to us on Thursday. Is that the day that we will be back?

Yes. Okay. We'll be back with episode 36.