King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Baseball attendance crisis in the Heartland! The White Sox are winning but not drawing! Except that they are. Plus: Remembering hoops legend Sue Gunter.
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Aug. 5, 2005 | The Indianapolis Star had a feature this week about how major league teams in the Midwest, including the American League-leading Chicago White Sox, are lagging in attendance.
"While attendance soars for Major League Baseball teams in some parts of the country, eight of the 14 worst-drawing clubs are located in cities in the Heartland," the subhead read.
Oh, no! Not the Heartland!
My bad stats radar (Statsdar™) red-lined.
But reporter Michael Pointer does a pretty good job of quoting various team officials saying the people haven't come because their teams either haven't won (Cincinnati Reds, Pittsburgh Pirates) or play in a dump (Minnesota Twins), even wrapping the whole thing up with this line: "Maybe it's no wonder the fans haven't showed up."
Back when I worked on a newspaper copy desk, the Metro section would regularly run pieces "investigating" some trumped-up problem or scandal, with the perfectly reasonable explanation for whatever was going on buried in Paragraph 25 out of 26. I used to refer to that as "the never-mind graf."
Still, the piece points to the White Sox as one of the teams failing to draw. An accompanying chart shows attendance through Aug. 1 for the eight Midwestern teams. The Cardinals and Cubs were third and sixth in baseball, while the White Sox were 17th, averaging 27,910.
A crisis on the South Side? They're winning but not drawing!
This is how stats can betray you. I'm not sure what it is about the Chicago White Sox that makes people get sloppy with stats, but here we go again.
First, attendance is really easy to figure out. There are two ways to draw big crowds in the major leagues. A team must either:
1) Win, while not playing in a ballpark that is an absolute leaking toilet, or
2) Play in a ballpark that's about 100 years old and that people find charming.
That's it. The only stadiums that fall under the exception to Rule 1 are the Metrodome in Minneapolis and Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg. The only ones covered by Rule 2 are Wrigley Field and Fenway Park.
So if you match up Midwestern teams' rank in attendance with their rank in winning percentage, there's a whole big bunch of correlation. Here they are, with attendance rank first, then winning percentage rank, through Aug. 1:
| Att. rank | Win pct. rank | |
| St.Louis | 3 | 2 |
| Cubs | 6 | 16 (tie) |
| White Sox | 17 | 1 |
| Milwaukee | 18 | 18 |
| Minnesota | 20 | 13 |
| Detroit | 21 | 22 |
| Cincinnati | 22 | 23 (tie) |
| Pittsburgh | 25 | 27 |
| Cleveland | 28 | 11 (tie) |
| Kansas City | 29 | 29 |
The anomalies are pretty easy to explain, as Pointer shows. The Chicago Cubs draw whether they're winning or losing because of Wrigley. The Twins can only draw so much because it's just downright depressing to go to the Metrodome.
The Cleveland Indians have been losing for a few years, and while they're improved this year, they're not quite in the thick of the wild-card race, so they haven't captured the attention of casual fans yet.
That leaves the White Sox.