Where the Wild Things Aren’t: Bulls-Cavs, Behind the Box Score
February 19, 2016Browns release TE Jim Dray, DL Randy Starks
February 19, 2016Oh hello WFNY. It’s Friday and I figured I would try and get your day started off right now that all the NBA trades are complete. Despite our residual Anderson Varejao sadness, let’s try and make it a good weekend, shall we? So let’s start with a discussion of Cleveland Indians attendance!
Trying to encapsulate Cleveland Indians excitement with a statistic…
So I’ve been thinking a lot about the Indians and how little I’ve found them exciting over the past ten years and I wanted to try and figure out what the metric might be to describe it. Wins is weird because you can pile up a bunch of meaningless wins late in a year. So I started looking through Baseball Reference and I looked at walk off wins and walk off losses, but that didn’t yield much. Then I decided to have a look at Days in First Place… And then I plotted it against average attendance and it looked pretty interesting.
What do you think?
I’ve spent a long time getting emo about Victor Martinez and plotting Cleveland Indians trades against attendance, but it probably isn’t the trades. It’s probably what the trades haven’t been able to yield in terms of being competitive in the division. This encapsulates how little fans got to enjoy the mad dash to the Wild Card. It encapsulates the slow starts. It encapsulates so very much about the Indians since the year 2000. The Cleveland Indians have not played from in front all that much. Period.
Even if I like Channing Frye I hate trading Anderson Varejao…
Channing Frye is a good acquisition for the Cleveland Cavaliers. He shoots nearly 40 percent from three and at his size, he should create one heck of a mismatch being deadly from three at 6-foot 11-inches and an over seven-foot wingspan, but the loss of Anderson Varejao leaves me concerned. Maybe it’s just some sentimentality talking, but I’m not so sure that this improves the Cavaliers’ chances in the playoffs.
In fairness to the Cavaliers and their move, Anderson Varejao’s health is one heck of a wild card. Varejao could have been a big deal in the playoffs last season, but he was out. Not including the current year, Varejao’s five-year average was 34.4 games per season. When you have title aspirations, as the Cleveland Cavaliers clearly do, it is reasonable to put your money on the guy who has averaged 75.8 games per season over the same time period. And he’s shot 0.390 from three. And he’s averaged 10.59 points and 5.35 rebounds while shooting nearly 84 percent from the free throw line.
Even with all those things in mind, losing Anderson Varejao gives me pause. The playoffs are all about doing things in unconventional ways. You have to find ways to disrupt the opposition and we saw the way Matthew Dellavedova worked to disrupt the Warriors in the finals. Anderson Varejao does some of those kinds of things that can help you really take a team out of rhythm, even if it doesn’t necessarily show up in the box score. He’s not going to bomb at 40 percent from three, and that’s certainly worth a lot to the Cavaliers, but it’s hard to imagine Channing Frye can bring a lot of unconventional disruption to the opposing team.
Obviously I hope it all works. I hope that Channing Frye not only keeps up what he’s done in the past, but is able to go to a new level playing alongside LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love. Right now it feels like a move that’s designed to try and chase down what the Golden State Warriors do rather than a part of building your own team and your own style that you force other teams to adapt to. Maybe Anderson Varejao was too far gone to make that kind of impact, but he brought something very different and atypical to the game that is really difficult for other teams to replicate. At least he was able to do it when he was healthy.
I get it. I hope for the best. I am not over the moon, however.
Your weekly moment of soccer zen…
Nothing to say. Just incredible individual work and a wonderful camera angle on the finish.
A nice conversation about things with Chad Zumock…
I forgot to post this podcast to WFNY earlier in the week, but I had a really nice conversation about a bunch of things with Chad Zumock. I really think it’s one of the podcasts that people will enjoy, and I did a bit more explaining about my feelings on Kevin Kiley and why I think CBS was wrong.
16 Comments
It’d be interesting if you could add average TV ratings into that.
Messi is like the 8th wonder of the world.
Don’t be sad, that was a good trade for the Cavs. Think Hot Rod Williams.
Indians – built it and they will come. Super graph, even better commentary.
Very different correlation than Browns attendance vs days in first place.
“It’s probably what the trades haven’t been able to yield in terms of being competitive in the division . . . The Cleveland Indians have not played from in front all that much.”
Being competitive isn’t the same as playing from in front. That’s not to defend the Indians record in any way, but it shows that the standard set for them to just get out of the very bottom of the attendance ranking is pretty darn high.
I wonder if it really is though? The Browns don’t get blacked out, but when they pan around the stadium from October on there sure are a lot of empty seats. Are these people buying tickets and no-showing?
The Indians were 32-43 in the Central last year. That is not competitive in the division.
Interestingly, the last place Tigers were 41-34 in the Central last year and just non-competitive against the rest of the league.
I feel like this is meaningful, but it is Friday afternoon and I just ate lunch so I am going to nap now.
I probably think more highly of the Tribe’s competitiveness last year than most, but it’s certainly not a the molehill I’m going to die on.
2013 though? Yesterday, Craig said “merely being a really exciting 30-day span” when they were within 5 games of a playoff spot the entire year. That’s what I’m trying to get at. Baseball can be exciting and competitive even when your team isn’t benefiting from a five year stretch of playing in maybe the worst division in baseball history.
I don’t think attendance is a function of performance the way it used to be. I made the point about the Browns below and asked the question about ratings because I believe that for most fans the in-the-park experience is now inferior to the at home experience. In 1996 you could watch a game on your low-definition 32″ TV or go to a bar and watch it low-def on a 40″ TV.
Now you can track pitches pixel-by-pixel on a 60″ 4k TV. Same deal with the Browns. With the advent of first HD and now Ultra-HD TVs your couch at home is literally better than any seat you can have at either event.
I won’t disagree with any of that. But I don’t see how that explains the Indians performing that poorly compared to the rest of MLB teams, who fight the same exact battle. Is there something about the water in Cleveland that drives us to sit on our butts inside instead of getting up and out in the sun?
I showed this to my marketing research man- uncle. His thought:
“In a big data world this is quite interesting and generates many other things to try to scour out of big data that is available, like season ticket sales (to see how correlated it is to days in first place the year before), # days into the season when fall behind by 10 games or 7 or something (how soon fans give up), #days within 3 games of lead, etc. There is probably some statistic that tracks even more closely.”
It could be a self-sustaining downward trajectory. The draw of an in-person game is usually the atmosphere (energy of the crowd being the biggest factor imho) and once it starts to taper there is less reason to go, so less people go and those that do experience a weaker atmosphere and are in turn less likely to go next time, and so on.
If my hypothesis is correct than the only solution is a sustained period of exciting success (as opposed to the mundane, grinding, death-march success of “solid-fundamental play”). We could win a ton of games potentially with a super high OBP driven solely by walks and bunts, but man would that be a soul-crusher to watch day after day. As opposed to the tension of not knowing whether or not the hitter could smash a double on any given pitch.
“super high OBP driven solely by . . . bunts”
Does not compute.
Sorry, I don’t mean sacrifice bunts, those are always stupid. I mean super fast guys digging them out.
But back to my point, to counteract the ever-weakening atmosphere, you need some excitement on the field. Sustainable, consistent, excitement.
Between the product on the field and the insufferable fan base you couldn’t pay me to attend a Browns game while I have the home viewing options there are today.
True, technically should be Browns *tickets sold* vs days in first place. The general point is that Browns sub-mediocrity receives a far greater share of Cleveland attention than competitive Indians teams.
I’m not unbiased, but I don’t think I’m too far off, but there’s no MLB player I find more exciting than Lindor. Kipnis ain’t a bad second choice either.