A Check of Numbers: Attendance, Standings, and Coaching...

Three-Dot Wednesday 4.23

Weird how attendance improves when the team is good. (photo by author)

I was recently asked if the San Francisco Giants are actually a good team this season. My reply was I wasn’t sure yet, but they are currently beating the teams that they should be beating, which is always a good thing…

Yet, broadcaster Dave Flemming the other day said the Giants have “Played the toughest opening schedule in the majors.” Uh, say what? I think I know what a tough schedule is, and this has not been it. Playing seven straight games in the east against the Yankees and Phillies, sure, that’s not easy. But they went 4-3 in those games, and against the rest of the not-exceedingly-difficult schedule they’re 11-6 (sitting at 15-9 after splitting the first two against Brewers going into Wednesday night).

This is a team that needs to collect all the wins they can before they play the teams above them in the standings, and that’s coming quickly. In the next two weeks they play three first place teams- the Texas Rangers, San Diego Padres and Chicago Cubs, with only a four-game respite against the woeful Colorado Rockies in between- but those games are in Colorado, which has been a house of horrors for the Giants even when the Rockies are atrocious, like they are right now…

If it weren’t for the West Sacramento Nomads and the Chicago White Sox, the Rockies would be getting all the attention as the worst-run franchise in the major leagues. Colorado lost 101 games last year and are off to the worst start in franchise history this season, at 4-18. Yet they have shown no real signs of trying to improve, and all you have to do is look at a different set of numbers besides wins and losses to figure out why…

Last season, the Rockies were 15^th in home attendance among the 30 major league teams. That’s exactly the halfway point. They averaged 31,361 fans for a team that was awful. (The Giants spent a lot more in salary, finished under .500 themselves, and were 10^th, at just over 33,000 per game.) So why should the Rockies even try? They play home games in Denver, where summer evenings are beautiful and a game at the downtown ballpark is pleasant regardless of how the team is doing…

And 15^th is the lowest attendance ranking they’ve had in almost a decade. They are constantly in the top 10 for attendance, yet they are headed for their 7^th straight season without coming close to competing for a playoff spot…

They are taking a page out of the Chicago Cubs playbook from the 50’s and 60’s, and exactly what minor league teams do to get casuals to the ballpark: If people are having a good time, the record of the team is almost insignificant. On a 15-game losing streak and they’ve already lost 90 games and it’s not even September? Who cares if it’s “Brew Fest Night” and all the good Colorado breweries are offering samples? This is a thing that’s in its 12^th year when the Rockies host it on August 30^th- when they will have assuredly lost 90 games before September. (15-game losing streak not guaranteed.)

The bottom line is, well, they’re successful on the bottom line without putting a winning team on the field. That’s not how it should work, but it is, and the teams that can turn a profit without satisfying the fan base will continue to do so until the fans stop showing up. So far, that hasn’t been the case in Colorado…

This year, they’re currently 17^th in home attendance- but they are one of only four teams that have played fewer than ten home games, so the average is right now a little lower than it probably really is…

Oh, in a previous column about attendance- focusing mostly on those West Sacramento Nomads- I noted that at they are averaging about 10,000 a game (in a stadium that only fits 13,000) and would probably pass the 100,000 mark in game ten. Well, they have just played 10 home games- and are at 100,489…

The lesson, as always, is don’t doubt the dude....

The wish list for the next New York Rangers head coach, according to ESPN hockey insider Emily Kaplan, is like a who’s who of anybody who’s coached in the NHL in the last 30 years. The list she reported isn’t in alphabetical order, so it must be in order of preference: “John Tortorella, Joel Quenneville, Jay Woodcroft, David Carle, Michael Peca and Jay Leach — as well as Rick Tocchet and Mike Sullivan, if they are available.”

It's truly an incredible list for anybody who’s followed the game for a while. The NHL is famous for recycling coaches and this just takes the cake. It seems like the only names they left off the list are Scotty Bowman, Jack Adams, and Reg Dunlop...

(To make the punchline clear, Scotty Bowman is the winningest coach in NHL history and won nine Stanley Cups as head coach [and is 91], the annual coach of the year award is called the Jack Adams trophy, and Reg Dunlop is Paul Newman’s character in the classic “Slap Shot.”)

It sure looks like the New Orleans Saints need a quarterback, with Derek Carr all of a sudden being diagnosed with a catastrophic yet completely unnamed shoulder injury. With the NFL draft beginning Thursday, a regular reader of this column posed this trivia question to me: the Saints have drafted a quarterback in the first round exactly once in their 55+ year history. Name him.

My response: “Did his sons have decent NFL careers?”

“Yeah, they were all right.”

“His grandson his named after him for a reason.”

The answer is Archie Manning, who the Saints took in the first round with the second overall pick in 1971… and have never taken a QB in the first round since, which is mind-boggling. His sons are Peyton and Eli (who, yeah, “had decent careers”), and his grandson is the starting QB in college at Texas (and he’ll likely be a number one pick in the draft in the next few years), and he goes by “Arch Manning.”

You don’t meet a lot of Archie’s nowadays. Do you, Jughead?

How important did the first Archie consider that 1971 draft? He forgot it was happening…

Kind of like Rockies management forgetting that sometimes you need a good team to get people to come to the ballpark. I mean, beer is a pretty good excuse…

Support the team? Wait, there’s a team? How are they doing? Yikes, give me another beer. (Courtesy: Colorado Rockies)