Midseason Report: Braves' Attendance and TV Ratings Are Up

MLB attendance is up almost across the board, while ratings are more of a mixed picture.

Discussions of MLB's various new rules dominated discussion around the sport in the spring, and the supposed effects of those rules changes still get brought up fairly frequently. The league has been puffing its chest of late regarding attendance figures, which have jumped from 2022 thus far.

For the Braves, they've seen a jump from an average home attendance of 38,641 last season to 39,076 a little over halfway through this season. (The club got in all 81 home games last season and have played 45 of their 81 home games so far this year.) It's a modest gain - 435 people extra per game on average, about a 1.1% increase - but an increase nonetheless. Obviously, the team is off to a ridiculously good start this year, even compared to last year's 101-win defending world champs, who famously didn't really get going until June. But what about the whole league? Are the high-flying Braves simply an outlier based on their tremendous level of play?

The league in general is seeing an uptick. Compared to 2022's figures, only six teams' average home attendance marks are down. Of those, the rebuilding Nationals and deeply disappointing White Sox are down the most - over 3,000 fans a game. The Red Sox, Giants, and Brewers are down very small amounts, while the Rockies - who always draw pretty well despite how horribly managed the franchise is - are down over 1,500 fans a game. Boston, San Francisco, and Milwaukee are all still in contention, so there's plenty of time for those figures to go up. (The Giants' 2022 figure may also have been inflated after their surprising 2021 campaign, which they couldn't replicate last year.)

As far as teams who've seen spikes in their attendance, note that the Braves finished fourth in MLB in average home attendance in 2022. With 435 more fans attending per game this year, they've still dropped to sixth, with surges in San Diego and Philadelphia moving those teams ahead of the Braves on the chart. (The Dodgers, Cardinals, and Yankees rank one-two-three in home attendance this year, just as they did in 2022.) The Phillies, buttressed by their surprise pennant run last season, are drawing over 11,000 more fans per game this year, jumping from 16th in baseball last year to fifth in 2023.

14 teams have seen an increase of over 1,000 fans from last year. Of those, most make a lot of sense...

- The Marlins, Reds, Orioles, Diamondbacks, and Rangers have become contenders.

- The Pirates got off to an unsustainably hot start.

- The Rays moved from wild card contender to league-leader.

- The Angels have Shohei Ohtani (at least for now).

- The Guardians have perhaps moved past the initial fallout from their decision to change their name, though this is just personal speculation.

- The Astros are the defending world champs.

- The Blue Jays aren't dealing with the same stringent Covid regulations.

- The Padres reached the NLCS last year and spent like drunks in the offseason.

Add in the aforementioned Phillies, and the only team not accounted for here is the Cubs, who did make some notable acquisitions in the offseason and are still in contention in the NL Central despite their sub-.500 record. (They're the only team in that division with a positive run differential.)

Is it all sunshine and roses? Well, right now, mostly yes. We'll see how this plays over the full season, as some attendance figures could start to decline for various reasons. The Mets are up 565 fans, but will that continue if they keep underachieving? (The same logic applies to the Padres and their 3,447-fan spike, too.) Will the Pirates' numbers drop now that the team has turned back into a pumpkin? The numbers are slightly up in Oakland out of spite as much as anything, but that seems unlikely to continue. (I expect it to completely crater.) If the Angels trade Sho-Time, that's another club you'd expect to see a huge dip.

But still, the league is being vocal about the numbers going up, and they've backed that up with some chest-thumping about the TV ratings. In the early part of the season, there were repeated articles highlighting increased ratings and the rules changes as the reason why. The numbers have somewhat muddied over the last month or so, with the All-Star Game's terrible viewership totals taking a little wind out of the league's sails.

But ESPN and TBS are reporting increases in their national broadcast ratings (TBS a rather large jump, with ESPN's comparatively modest), while Fox seems to be pinballing from week to week and FS1 has almost bottomed out. There's a whole lot of background context here involving cord-cutting that I don't have time to get into, but it's definitely hurt FS1 especially and has been crippling ESPN for years now. That the numbers are up at all for the Worldwide Leader is a good sign for the network and the league, really.

On the Braves' front, in a year where regional sports networks (RSNs) are struggling to stay solvent and MLB has had to come up with contingency plans to make sure local fans can still see their teams, Bally Sports South and Southeast have reported major gains. Again, this is the best team in baseball, so gains are to be perhaps expected. But those numbers seem in line with what's going on with many other RSNs.

Considering that TV model may be about to collapse (MLB has already taken over local broadcasting duties for the Padres and has been on the cusp of doing so with other teams), this success could be seen as something of a Pyrrhic victory. (Local TV rights fees are huge cash cows for clubs, so losing them - even to create an in-house streaming model that's more practical for fans - would be a risky proposition at best.) Like attendance, we'll have to wait and see how some of this plays out, but unlike attendance - which is fairly cut and dried to some extent - there's a lot of context and whatnot to unpack with TV ratings. (And this also doesn't include Apple TV+ and Peacock's streamed broadcasts, which I can't find any viewership totals for. Streamers are always really cagey about revealing such details.)

Are all of these gains down to the new rules? Possibly. I think there was a kneejerk reaction early in the season to definitively ascribe any good news about baseball to the rules tweaks, and while that's oversimplifying it, the game certainly doesn't seem to have been hurt by the changes. I still think the shift ban was a little arbitrary, but the pitch clock and larger bases have been good moves. Game times are definitely way down (to their shortest since 1984), and the action has a more propulsive quality to it, similar to a college basketball game (at least until a college hoops game reaches the final minute or so, when it slows way down). It should be noted, though, that hitting homers still seems to be the name of the game for most teams, with the Braves leading the charge in that area.

While the rules drew most of the attention in the offseason, one major alteration that I think should've been discussed much more is the change in scheduling. Going to an NBA-style model where everybody plays everybody was long overdue, and while the appeal of seeing every team every year may wear off over time, it needs to be included more in discussions about the current health of the sport. Playing so many games against division rivals at the expense of ever seeing teams from two of the league's six divisions was always a mistake, and I'm very glad it was corrected. But again, like everything, we'll see how this all shakes out over the remainder of the season and in coming years. 

Personal note - I do not like the expanded playoffs (which of course started last year), even though they'll likely boost fan interest as more teams stay in contention throughout the summer. I think they'll eventually weaken interest in the regular season on the whole and perhaps turn the postseason into more of a slog for viewers, too. That's a supposition of mine, but I base it on the malaise Braves fans fell into toward the end of the Bobby Cox-era division title streak, where dominant regular season clubs repeatedly fell flat in the playoffs to the point that fans stopped caring. The club was top-four in the National League in attendance from 1992-2000, but dipped to sixth or below for the final five division title years, finishing 10th in the NL in 2004 and 2005. That might be a very Braves-centric viewpoint, as Atlanta has been victimized by the existence of the wild card(s) more than any other team, but I do think it will be an issue. 162 games is a lot to ask fans to care about, and increasing the playoff field risks further devaluing their importance.

Very long story short - baseball seems to be in a pretty good place right now, but uncertainty remains. As always, more data will help make sense of things, but the league and its fans are right to boast about what has so far been a very entertaining season.

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