He studies stuff like this, and he's really smart. The Dodgers haven't seemed very attractive, shall we say. And the Dodgers quite frankly in the last few years haven't had that continuity that they used to have in the O'Malley salad days. Sometimes it's easy to figure out what's going on with a team's attendance figures. For example, a team that has a good year and makes the playoffs for the first time in a while gets a boost in the next year.
Optimism runs high and so do advance ticket sales.
I didn't, but a lot of people thought they would. Indeed, through Wednesday's games the Pale Hose were up 16.5 percent over the same number of games last year. The New York Yankees have been dominant for several years, and their attendance is up slightly, by 2.4 percent. Similarly, a bad year will be followed by a drop in attendance, at least early in the year. At this time last year, for example, the Cleveland Indians, who had made the playoffs five years in a row, were averaging 41,765 fans a game.