i LOVE pitchers duels (gotta add, when WE win)

i love a 9 inning scoreless duel WAAAAY more than a coors game. and homerun field in the beginning was boring with all those 5,6 HR/ game.

i especially love pitchers duels when there's guys on second and third with 2 outs and the pitcher hasta to get out of the inning with the meat of the lineup coming up.

didn't everyone luuuuuuuv those 15 - 20 K (by one pitcher) games?

home runs are so cheap they a dime a dozen and the small parks made them so common they boring.

good pitching, well now, THAT'S exciting...

Probably my favorite game ever was Jack Morris' 1-0 ten inning ultimate win in the last-shall-be-first world series... And my favorite NFL game ended 6-3...

But David, I thought it was an established fact that attendance has tracked offence pretty much perfectly throughout history-- James' did several articles on it back in the eighties... or is my memory swiss cheesing on me again?

I don't know where David Pinto gets the weird idea that I think offense is the ONLY thing that drives attendance. That's silly and I never said it. The 1930s were a high-offense era but the Depression pushed attendance down, anyway. (Although the slam-bash 1930 season posted record attendance before the Depression really bit hard.)

If economic conditions deteriorate enormously, of course attendance will suffer regardless of offensive levels. But under any reasonable set of economic conditions, high offense will tend to boost attendance and low offense will tend to depress it. As Bill James put it in that Historical Abstract article:

"With the sole exception of the 1930s, every hitter's era in baseball history has been a period of growth, and every pitcher's era has been a period of stagnation...So often history counsels us in riddles; we should appreciate it when she speaks so clearly."

James' 1985 article was again confirmed by baseball's offense-fueled recovery from the 1994 strike, which David Pinto tries very uncovincingly to explain away. (In his article James humorously recounts similar attempts to explain away how baseball always seems to do better with higher offense.)

I'm a hardcore fan. If baseball puts the 1908 or 1968 game back on the field, I'll watch. But it's silly to think that casual fans will show the same enthusiasm for 1-0, 2-0, 2-1 games every day. To quote James once more:

"Fans like offense...Offense is the art of making something happen. Defense is the art of preventing anything from happening. It is more exciting to see something happen than to see somebody prevent anything from happening."

Amen, brother James. If offense continues to plummet this season, there will be an impact on attendance. Again, I don't see how baseball can avoid an attendence record because they've gotten rid of Montreal (another example of how other factors besides offense can affect attendance, as I previously pointed out.) But I don't expect any big jump in attendance if offense continues to decline.

Casey, there has to be a limit to how high offense can go, otherwise we're going to be stuck with four hour 10-9 games. Offense has fallen to 9.1 runs per game this year. That's not low offense.

Football feels that 42 points per game is optimum for fan enjoyment. I've heard that number is 9.0 for baseball games. At some point, 11 runs per game gets just as boring as 7 runs per game. What you need is a balance.

My feeling is that 10 runs a game is too high. You get too many games like Patriots day at Fenway where it took three hours to play six innings and score 16 runs. The fans around me were not paying attention to the game at that point.

And remember, too, that James wrote his article in the 1980's when offense was running at about 8.5 runs per game and baseball was attendance was doing well. If that was enough offense to foster growth then, I'm sure it's enough now.

Of course, there's a limit to how high offense can go. But it makes no sense to allow sudden drops in offense. Such big declines risk major drops in attendance.

To take the most recent example, baseball allowed offense to tumble to 9.24 runs a game in 2002, down ten percent from 10.28 runs a game in 2000 and the lowest level since 1993. Guess what? Attendance in 2002 was down to 68 million, the lowest in five years.

But that was 9/11 or the economy or the labor negotiations or something else. As Bill James pointed out in his article, people always try to find some other explanation for low attendance than the obvious: if you drain a lot of offense and action out of the games, fewer people buy tickets.

Baseball noticed the attendance decline and tried to get some more offense back in the game. Runs per game rose to 9.63 in 2004 and surprise, surprise...attendance for some reason climbed back to a record 73 million. But that was the economy or the presidential election or sunspots or something else. It's always something else.

As James said, why fight the lessons of history when she's lecturing you so clearly?

Yes, many other factors affect attendance bsides offense. Baseball will get a nice attendance boost this year just because they gave up on Montreal and moved to much friendlier territory in D.C. That should help avoid much of a drop in the overall figures.

But as your table points out, this year's offense decline is not small. People are noticing. And when people notice that there's a lot less action and offense in the game, they tend not to attend the games in such big numbers. If the offensive drop continues, I don't expect that baseball will see much of an overall rise in attendance this year, despite the one-time Montreal-Washington boost.

Out of curiosity, has anyone actually looked at attendance numbers for clubs tracked against their offenses? Do slugging teams tend to outdraw pitching-defense clubs? By controlling for winning, shouldn't this hypothesis be demonstrable by showing that good hitting teams outdraw good defense teams?

Casey,

I notice you left out that offense went up in 2003 but attendance went down. If you're going to quote stats, be complete. You can't cherry pick.

Andrew, that would be an interesting study. It's interesting to note that during the 1970's, the Dodgers led the majors in attendance. I don't remember the Dodgers being an overly offensive team, especially at Dodger Stadium. The Reds, known for their offense, were 2nd. Certainly, the Dodgers were not a bad offensive team, but they were known for their pitching more than anything. Both franchises had very successful decades winning.

I'm pretty sure that attendance is driven more by winning than anything else, but it would be interesting to see if two teams who were equally competitive saw better or worse attendance due to their scoring more runs. As you say, the Dodgers weren't known as an offensive juggernaut, and they did quite well for themselves. I don't have access to attendance records, but I'll wager an initial scrub of the numbers wouldn't be at all difficult.

Hey Andrew, like you said, it's not hard to get some insight into what draws attendance by looking at the numbers. I took winning pct, runs and total attendance for each 2004 team from baseball-reference.com, normalized winning pct and runs to zero mean and unit standard deviation, then ran regression with a bias/intercept. Winning percentage had the larger weight, but the weight on runs was also positive, so maybe people will come out to see offense, but only come out in droves for winning teams. Of course, these results must be taken with a large helping of salt---there are so many other factors in play that one year's worth of data surely isn't enough to get a true picture. Here are the weights:

WEIGHTS: pct=351874 runs=130625 bias=2416629

Since I "standardized" the input variables, there's not some clear, intuitive explanation for what the weights mean, except that winning is about 2.7 times more important than offense for drawing people to the games.

I really don't like high scoring games. I prefer a pitching duel with manufactured runs! Give me the days of Rickey Henderson, Tim Raines, and Vince Coleman with some pitching and I'm happier than can be!

Home runs are fun, but they bore me after a while and make me feel like the game is cheap and easy.

Speaking of stealing bases...we have some very good young base stealers these days... Juan Pierre, Luis Castillo, Carlos Beltran, Carl Crawford, Ichiro Suzuki, Johnny Damon, Brian Roberts, Scott Podsednik, Chone Figgins, Alex Sanchez, and even Edgar Renteria ain't bad. Other guys really could AND SHOULD steal more...A-Rod and Jimmy Rollins come to mind.

That's far more exciting to me than any high scoring HR driven game.

In fact, last year we saw Podsednik steal 70 bases, and he only got caught 13 times! In two years, he's stolen 113 bases and been caught ONLY 23 times. How's that for a good base stealer?

I'd give almost anything to see someone steal 100 again. Can you imagine how exciting THAT would be, even though it's not a record?

You should make an entry in your blog about modern base stealers and their %'s and stuff. That would be interesting, and few people write about 'em these days.

Attendance will easily top 2004's record breaking total, without a doubt. Most tickets are sold before the season, and DC alone adds a couple million.

If the minor decline in runs scored keeps up, I can't believe most folks will even notice, it's about a 5% decrease.