The positive news first.
Eight of Major League Baseball’s 30 franchises have formed exceptionally strong links with their fan bases, according to a new analysis of attendance data for the past 10 seasons. This elite group runs the gamut from the largest market in the majors (New York Yankees) to the smallest (Milwaukee Brewers).
Their success has been certified by my breakdowns of each club’s fan support index (FSI) for the decade from 2013 through 2022. (The two schedules played under Covid restrictions — 2020 and 2021 — were excluded from my calculations for obvious reasons, leaving a data pool of eight seasons per team.)
I’ve written about the FSI on several occasions, though it doesn’t hurt to reiterate a brief explanation. The index is a ratio of a club’s home attendance and its on-field record, plotted around a 100-point benchmark. If you’d like a deeper explanation of the formula, click here.
This is the important part: A score of precisely 100 points indicates that a club’s attendance is commensurate with its quality on the field. A higher index suggests box-office strength that exceeds expectations, while a two-digit FSI is a sign of lethargy.
The FSI is elastic, requiring less support for a bad team than a good one. Here’s an example from last year: The Toronto Blue Jays easily outdrew the Texas Rangers in home attendance: 2.65 million vs. 2.01 million. But it was considerably easier to root for the Jays (92-70 record) than the Rangers (68-94), a fact taken into account by the FSI. Texas actually finished with a higher index (111.3 points) than Toronto (108.6), signifying that the Rangers’ fan support was more impressive under the circumstances.
I took each team’s eight indexes from the 2013-2022 period and counted the number that exceeded the 100-point threshold and the number that fell short. The result was akin to a win-loss record. The Yankees, for example, finished 8-0, which means that their FSI exceeded 100 in all eight seasons.
I used the resulting records to divide the 30 clubs into five levels of fan support:
Excellent support (8-0 record)
Above-average support (7-1 or 6-2 records)
Average support (5-3, 4-4, or 3-5 records)
Below-average support (2-6 or 1-7 records)
Poor support (0-8 record)
Scroll below to see a rundown and a few explanatory notes for each group. You’ll see why the Yankees, Brewers, and their six comrades in the excellent echelon are rated so highly — and why the Miami Marlins, Oakland Athletics, Tampa Bay Rays, and four other franchises have so much to worry about.
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Excellent support
Chicago Cubs (8-0)
Colorado Rockies (8-0)
Los Angeles Angels (8-0)
Los Angeles Dodgers (8-0)
Milwaukee Brewers (8-0)
New York Yankees (8-0)
St. Louis Cardinals (8-0)
San Francisco Giants (8-0)
Notes: Market size can be an important factor in box-office success. The nation’s three largest metropolitan areas — New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago — are represented by four clubs in this group. They’re joined by St. Louis (renowned for decades as a baseball hotbed), San Francisco (an annual leader in the attendance derby), and a pair of smaller markets where baseball has proven to be consistently popular (Colorado and Milwaukee).
Above-average support
Boston Red Sox (6-2)
Detroit Tigers (6-2)
San Diego Padres (6-2)
Notes: Two old-line clubs, the Red Sox and Tigers, inspire fan loyalty that exceeds the national average, albeit falling short of the elite level. They’re joined by the Padres, who benefit from being the sole big-league team in San Diego since the departure of the football Chargers.
Average support
Texas Rangers (5-3)
Toronto Blue Jays (5-3)
New York Mets (4-4)
Washington Nationals (4-4)
Minnesota Twins (3-5)
Philadelphia Phillies (3-5)
Notes: Here are six markets where attendance is tightly synchronized with expectations, typically rising and falling with the home team’s on-field fortunes. Five of these six metros are among the largest in North America: Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Washington. Minnesota rounds out the midlevel group.
Below-average support
Atlanta Braves (2-6)
Cincinnati Reds (2-6)
Houston Astros (2-6)
Kansas City Royals (2-6)
Arizona Diamondbacks (1-7)
Baltimore Orioles (1-7)
Notes: Attendance is robust in Atlanta and Houston, as it should be. The Braves and Astros annually field two of the best squads in baseball, collectively winning three of the past six World Series. But the FSI suggests that both markets are still underperforming at the box office. Also falling short of expectations more often than not are Arizona, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Kansas City.
Poor support
Chicago White Sox (0-8)
Cleveland Guardians (0-8)
Miami Marlins (0-8)
Oakland Athletics (0-8)
Pittsburgh Pirates (0-8)
Seattle Mariners (0-8)
Tampa Bay Rays (0-8)
Notes: These are the seven clubs with real cause for worry, having fallen short of the FSI benchmark in all eight non-Covid seasons since 2013. The obvious candidates are here: Miami, Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Tampa Bay. But so is Chicago, where the White Sox are badly overshadowed by the Cubs. And Seattle, where the Mariners have made more progress on the field than at the box office. And Cleveland, where the then-Indians were once so popular than they sold out 455 straight games from 1995 to 2001, a feat the current Guardians find impossible to imagine.