Morning Buzz

One of the great justifications for the Giants keeping Barry Bonds is that they’re going to suck anyway, so why not sell some tickets?

Except, this is the one year the Giants DON’T have to worry about ticket sales. Cut ties with Bonds in November 2005, problem. Cut ties in November 2007, problem. Cut ties in November 2006, no problem whatsoever.

There’s one reason for that: the All-Star Game.

The Giants had been planning for years to be without Bonds by now; that’s why, in 2004, they had baseball give them the ’07 All-Star Game instead of the ‘06 event. Many charter-seat license agreements were scheduled to end after last season, and — as anyone who watched even one inning of one regular-season game knows — the team used the lure of a 2007 All-Star ticket to get those fans and other season-ticket holders to re-up.

This was the plan. This was so much the plan, in fact, that the Giants got the ‘07 event even though the ‘06 version was in Pittsburgh, which makes it the first time in 35 years that the game will be hosted by the same league, and that isn’t just a coincidence.

I looked at the past four years of attendance totals of teams that hosted the All-Star Game. (I cut it off there because the ‘02 game was in Milwaukee, which had opened Miller Park the previous year and obliterated the previous franchise record, which makes it a bit of a statistical quirk for this look). What I found was: 

TEAM                 YEAR BEFORE     YEAR OF       YEAR AFTER

White Sox ‘03     1,676,804             1,939,594      1,930,537

Astros  ’04          2,454,241             3,087,872      2,804,760

Tigers ‘05           1,917,004             2,024,485      2,595,937

Pirates ‘06          1,817,245             1,861,549          N/A

On a percentage basis, the White Sox picked up 15.7 percent in ticket sales, the Astros 25.8 percent, the Tigers 5.6 percent and the Pirates 2.4 percent. What makes it especially interesting is that none of the teams played appreciably better or worse from one year to the next, at least not in any way that would have driven regular-season ticket sales. (The Astros made the playoffs in ‘04, but they only finished a game out in ‘03, so that’s a wash.)

In the Tigers’ and Pirates’ case, their turns came at the precise time when the sheen of a new ballpark would have been wearing off and the constant losing would have been dragging down ticket sales.

Bottom line, I’d make a good-sized bet that the Giants would reach the magical 3 million mark again regardless of (maybe even despite?) Bonds’ presence and regardless of how good or bad they are.

And if they’d cut ties this off-season, memories would fade in a year and they wouldn’t have to factor marketing into whether to retain Bonds in 2008.