Costs of a 35,000 seat stadium

Ellis — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 16:39:18 -0000

The A's have been talking about making their new stadium a 35,000 seat ticket to decrease their reliance on walk up sales; reaction to this has been mixed. See commentary here and here.

But how much will that stadium hurt us, the fans? The A's average attendance per home game was a mere 27,179 last season and since 1999, where the A's have been above .500 ever year and in the hunt for the playoffs attendance should be about as high as it can be expected to be over the next several years, it has averaged 24,467.

Understandably, that doesn't mean that each game had exactly 27,179 fans. So, using data from Retrosheet.org, I used the attendance logs of each game over the past 5 seasons (1999-2004, 2005 not listed yet) to see exactly how many games we would have sold out in a 35,000 seat stadium. The results: 96 games would have been sold out, approximately 23.7% of all home games. The average attendance of those games: 43,800.69. This means that if we'd been playing in the hypothetical new stadium, there would have been about 844,866 fewer fans over the five years, or about 168,973 a year. Assuming an average ticket price of $10 (arbitrary) that 1.68 million a year, or five rookies' salary. NOTE: this data doesn't include the playoffs, which are almost always sellouts for any team/stadium.

If you assume that a stadium increases attendance, the results change a little, but not really significantly. Increasing attendance by 10% create 112 sellouts (27.6%) with an excess attendance of 1,288,305. Increasing attendance by 20% creates 144 sellouts (35.5%) with an excess attendance of 1,818,918. Bottom line: the new stadium will really reflect only a minority of the games (there were 405 home games over this time). Everyone who wanted to would have been able to see the games at least 64.5% of the time.

IMO, the biggest impact would be on the growth of the fan base. As you can see from the charts below, more people showed up for the games against the big market teams: the casual fans tend to show up only for the games against big teams, like the Yankees, Giants and Mariners.

The breakdown of what teams we played during the hypothetical sellouts:

Visitor | Times played
----------+-----------
ANA | 9
ARI | 1
ATL | 1
BAL | 2
BOS | 8
CHA | 3
CLE | 3
DET | 2
HOU | 1
KCA | 6
LAN | 2
MIN | 2
NYA | 20
SEA | 12
SFN | 17
TBA | 2
TEX | 5
TOR | 1
----------------------

Complete list including dates here, data here and in .csv form here.

The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.

SB Nation User Blog: Ellis

Costs of a 35,000 seat stadium