Need a little baseball attendance help

In attempting to find a comprehensive list of sellouts for an assignment I'm working on (comparing Indians' 455 to other current ones), I was unable to turn up such a document or any sort of current sellout streak figures....

Any help/assistance would be outstanding....

 

Did you check with Elias?

 

The Colorado Avs currently have the longest streak of the 'Big 4' Major Leagues at 484. Can Avs keep ticket streak alive?
By Terry Frei
Denver Post Staff Columnist
Every year, we ask: Is the Avalanche sellout streak, the longest in the four major leagues, about to end?

The question was appropriate to an unprecedented degree a year ago, with the NHL coming off a dark season and the Avalanche suddenly minus Peter Forsberg and Adam Foote.

It is even more pertinent now, with Alex Tanguay, Rob Blake and Dan Hinote also gone and other signs pointing to a possible deterioration of the on-ice product.

The gloomy prognosis could turn out to be wrong, of course, and as the re-signings of Joe Sakic and the others attest, it's not as if the Avalanche completely turtled on the contract front and let everyone depart.

But the streak is in danger.

It stands at 484 regular-season and playoff games, and could reach 500 against St. Louis on Dec. 13.

Paul Andrews, Kroenke Sports' executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Thursday wanted it known he isn't losing sleep over whether the sellout streak survives,



even as he emphasized that season tickets and 14-game packages still are available.
"We never go into any year taking sellouts for granted," he said.

Andrews placed the renewal rate for Avalanche season tickets at more than 90 percent.

"We have a few months to go, and we're bullish," Andrews said.

The other tricky part to this is that the Avalanche traditionally has "capped" season tickets, and Andrews said he would set that figure anywhere between 13,000 and 14,500, depending on where the available seats were, preserving a selection for the single-game sale that will begin in September.

In the past, the Avalanche has bristled at any hint the sellout streak was being artificially perpetuated, perhaps with the help of pointers gleaned from studying how the Tammany Hall machine used to "find" votes in New York. (Granted, that was so long ago, Chris Chelios was a young defenseman.)

If you were on Ticketmaster's e-mail list, you received missives about specials on Avalanche tickets for specific games. Ads on the television broadcasts relentlessly plugged tickets for upcoming home games, including many on weeknights against lackluster opponents. And 48 hours later, voilà, that game was a sellout. For many home games, there have been blocks of empty seats, which the Avalanche usually attributes to unused group tickets that have been sold.

So it all adds up to at least a little bit of suspicion, if not outright scoffing, about whether the streak has remained legitimate.

 

I went to their web site, but unless I'm missing something, I couldn't find their info. online; their web site just has a link to their book...

Thanks though, and D_B, thanks for that info.

 

Nebraska has something like 280 something consecutive sellouts in college too.

 

... so do the Marlins

 

If you're including colleges, that's out of Elias' realm. Maybe try the league PR offices for the three majors (and the NHL). Some NFL teams would have long streaks, but they were interrupted by replacement player games during one of the labor stoppages.

The Knicks used to claim a long streak, but most people in NY said it wasn't legit.

 

Pretty sure the Red Sox have the longest current streak (2nd overall) in baseball (assuming they banged out that final homestand). Right around 300, they post the number on the jumbotrom every 8th inning.

 

The Avs ticket streak is totally phony.

Then again, most attendence "streaks" are, since they are based on tickets distributed/sold and not butts in the seats. Some teams just don't care enough to give away their remaining tickets to maintain a "sellout," some do.

 

Elias usually isn't interested in helping anyone but its paying customers.

Try the Society for American Baseball Research (sabr.org).

 

Yeah, weren't the Knicks claiming "sellouts" when you could count maybe 11,000 in the Garden?