Monday, March 2, 2020

Bobbleheads 2020

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

Players have reported to camp, pitchers are stretching out, and Spring Training is underway.

But the best part is that teams have announced their 2020 promotional schedules which gives way to the question: has Major League Baseball begun to appreciate the potential of the bobblehead?

Hint, the San Diego Padres may have figured it out...



There are two things team must consider when making decisions about promotional giveaways (items that I loosely consider to have a resale value of at least $10) at sporting events:
  1. Promos increase ticket sales by a significant amount; and,
  2. Promos allow the team to charge more for tickets.
To understand the promotional impacts on attendance, I undertake the following steps, following the same procedure that I have done for the previous four years:
  • Scrape each team's website for their promotional giveaway schedule for 2020,
  • Parse through the text of each schedule to identify dates with promos such as:
    • replica World Series rings;
    • collectible coins;
    • collectible pins; and
    • Bobbleheads!
  • Predict attendance at each game with and without a hypothetical promo using a simple regression model,
  • Choose the best dates for which promos would provide the most value to the team; and,
  • Compare my hypothetical promo schedule to the actual promo schedule and estimate the additional revenue from my promo schedule.
There are currently 223 promo days scheduled for the 2020 MLB season. While a few teams either have not yet published their promotional schedule or are not offering meaningful promotions this year (Miami and Colorado), 2020 should ultimately feature a similar number of promo days as we are accustomed to seeing.

In 2020, the model says there are 172 games that have been sub-optimally chosen to feature a promo. I therefore reassign 77% of promo days (172/223) and find that the entire league may be foregoing ticket sales to the tune of ...

... $6.4 million!

Here's this years number in some historical context.

Year   Total Promos   Reassigned Promos   Forgone Revenue ($)
             
             
2016   232   166   3.2M
             
2017   231   170   4.0M
             
2018   254   185   3.8M
             
2019   227   180   5.0M
             
2020   223   172   6.4M
             

As seen in past years, the St. Louis Cardinals, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Chicago Cubs lead the league in terms of foregone revenue, but an appearance at the top of the list of losers is largely in part due to the fact that these teams have either a) above-average number of promos; or, b) above-average ticket price (i.e., Chicago Cubs).

Excluding the aforementioned clubs without promos, the San Diego Padres had the least foregone revenue. This is partially because of their more reasonably priced tickets (3rd cheapest in the league) but also because the two games they chose to feature promos were ranked the 4th and 5th best options by the model: the model chose to reassign the promo games but picked games that would sell only ~109 more tickets each.

Way to show them how it's done, Padres!

Below are the results for each individual team. How did your team do?        
  Team   Total Promos   Reassigned Promos   Forgone Tickets (#)   Forgone Revenue ($)
                   
                   
1 St. Louis Cardinals   19   13   34,635   1,230,942
                   
2 Los Angeles Dodgers   18   15   20,469   872,393
                   
3 Chicago Cubs   7   6   14,007   833,292
                   
4 San Francisco Giants   6   5   13,562   519,681
                   
5 Milwaukee Brewers   20   11   18,055   513,493
                   
6 Atlanta Braves   18   15   14,224   418,746
                   
7 Washington Nationals   10   9   5,630   248,415
                   
8 New York Yankees   8   6   4,910   233,829
                   
9 Toronto Blue Jays   8   7   7,631   226,562
                   
10 Boston Red Sox   3   3   2,604   154,445
                   
11 Philadelphia Phillies   5   4   3,650   131,529
                   
12 New York Mets   11   8   4,743   130,916
                   
13 Minnesota Twins   6   5   3,277   107,104
                   
14 Houston Astros   5   4   1,822   90,822
                   
15 Seattle Mariners   4   4   2,165   81,762
                   
16 Chicago White Sox   5   5   2,401   68,133
                   
17 Pittsburgh Pirates   10   8   2,861   65,253
                   
18 Texas Rangers   4   3   2,281   58,740
                   
19 Cleveland   6   4   1,776   55,344
                   
20 Cincinnati Reds   11   7   2,468   52,175
                   
21 Baltimore Orioles   9   5   1,618   48,465
                   
22 Tampa Bay Rays   8   7   2,144   48,314
                   
23 Los Angeles Angels   4   4   1,545   47,773
                   
24 Arizona Diamondbacks   5   4   1,492   31,132
                   
25 Detroit Tigers   6   4   1,076   30,461
                   
26 Oakland A's   3   3   1,116   27,127
                   
27 Kansas City Royals   2   1   774   25,433
                   
28 San Diego Padres   2   2   217   4,818
                   
T-29 Colorado Rockies   0   0   0   0
                   
T-29 Miami Marlins   0   0   0   0
                   
  Total MLB   223   172   173,153   6,357,099

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