Friday, February 04, 2005

Enough With The Whining

Lemme get this right. You trade for Sammy Sosa and your fans respond by purchasing 5,000 additional season ticket packages in one weekend. And you're still whining?

Matt Dryer, Orioles senior director of advertising and promotions, said yesterday "we would be ecstatic if we could match [last seasonĀ“s 2.74[ThSp]million home attendance]" and added the strong season ticket sales for the Washington Nationals present a serious threat to the turnstile counts at Camden Yards.

"They've sold more than 18,000 season tickets already. That's a lot of tickets coming into this area," Dryer said. "How many of those folks are going to stop coming to see us?"

I'm really getting tired of it. I know he's just a marketing guy and its his job to worry about this sort of thing, but if he and the entire team would just devote half the attention they're paying to the Nats to the promotion and improvement of their own farking team, the Nats won't be a problem!

And how useful is it to have the marketing guy whining in the paper? No one likes a crybaby. And instead of using the media as an outlet for how great the team's going to be, its potential, or the fun of attending a game at Camden Yards, he moans about the disadvantage he's at.

The same sort of thing happened in Montreal and in Minnesota. The owners of those teams spent so long bitching and moaning about how pitiful their teams were, how pitiful their chances were and what ratholes their stadiums were, that the people started to believe. And then these jerks wonder why no one's showing up.

3 Comments:

  • 18000 x 81= 1,458,000 (!) Even if only 20% of those were diverted from Camden Yards I might whine too. On the other hand it bodes well for the survivability of the Nats...

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2/04/2005 11:40 AM  

  • There's no doubt that the Nats are going to sway some people from making the drive up to DC. 20%? I guess that's plausible.

    But, the bigger point--and maybe one I didn't make clear enough--is that with just a little bit of positive buzz (the Sosa signing) the Baltimore fans responded.

    Instead of relentlessly focusing on the negative, create some positive buzz, stake your claim to ALL of Maryland, reassert yourself in the region and fight for your fans. Don't throw your hands up and say "Gee, this is hard because we have other teams to compete with."

    By Blogger Chris Needham, at 2/04/2005 11:44 AM  

  • I did a study almost a year ago looking at how attendance for franchises was affected by the relocation of other nearby franchises, and found little if any correlation between the two. Attendance is much more affected by winning percentage than by the presence or absence of another franchise, especially in the long run.

    By Blogger Travis M. Nelson, at 2/04/2005 11:57 AM  

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