Why run attendance?

Someone please explain to me why we continue to run MLB attendance figures with each boxscore, and "because it's too time-consuming to go in and delete every one" is not an acceptable answer. This is the only non-factual item there and, as Wednesday's Atlanta-Florida game showed, it can be a terrible misrepresentation. The box indicates there were more than 11,000 there when, by the stories I read, the actual figure was about 600. If nothing else, we ought to list this for what it is: tickets sold.

 

Sometimes, attendance can tell a story in itself.

Tampa Bay not only doesn't reek of epic fail, it looks like the Rays are going to postseason. Yet the Rays attendance figures do not reflect those of a team that currently has the best record in baseball.

 

It's based on tickets sold -- through corporations, season tickets, gate sales, etc. -- so while it tells a different picture, I'm not so sure it isn't accurate. It is misleading, though, if you don't know it's not just how many people are sitting in the stadium.

 

Mark Cuban would like to know this as well:

http://www.salon.com/news/sports/col/kaufman/2003/12/10/wednesday/

 

Maybe they can do what the NFL used to do; publish the no-shows.

 

No, it's not accurate if you report attendance at 11,000 when there were 600 people in the stadium. Attendance was 600; tickets sold was 11,000; there's a difference.

 

People like everything quantified, including how many of said people were at the game. If we had stats on how many nachos got sold and how many deuces got dropped, we'd run 'em

 

That would be Trouser Buddah's beat.

 

Yeah, wasn't that great? I think in a roundabout way announcing no-shows, while seeming to show a weakness, actually displayed the NFL's strength. It said, ``Yup, here's a negative statistic and we're so superior and powerful we're just going to to announce it. We can take it.''

 

Actually, when I saw the topic, I thought it was going to be about putting attendance in a game story, something I believe is unnecessary about 95 percent of the time.

My former shop had a rule I very much agree with, telling writers not to put the attendance in a gamer unless there's a compelling reason to, such as the end of a sellout streak or the largest (or smallest) crowd in 20 years or something like that. Some places I've worked went the opposite way, mandating writers mention the attendance.

To me, unless there's a reason it's part of the story, the attendance figure just becomes clutter, an irrelevant fact forced into the copy for its own sake.

Any thoughts?

 

The AJC spent at least a year putting attendance in prep football stories. I'm pretty sure the guys were just making it up.

 

I've been at games before where the metro writers just pulled a number out of their ass.

If you're going to do that, why bother?