Had the team not insisted on this dome nonsense and its outlandish cost, they could have been in a new stadium by now. Morons.
MLB.COM
[...]The Marlins were rained out three times in 2006, all on the road. Florida's last postponement at Dolphin Stadium was on Sept. 5, 2004, when Hurricane Frances forced the rescheduling of a series with the Cubs.
6 comments:
I don't know about the Marlins......but I could sure use a dome! Just found a new leak this morning.
Why are the taxpayers even paying for this crap? There are no reliable studies that show that building stadiums is even economically good for the community.
Yea, the economics of new stadiums is highly suspect. In the case of the Marlins, which are in fact a "small market" team, they're insane.
One a per-capita basis of people within say 70 miles of the stadium, the Marlins draw better than the Yankees or Mets, yet that's only in the 14,000/night range.
There's a lot of whining in the media about "nobody comes to the games", but they do -- and at rates higher than the Mets and Yanks. The problem is FL geography and how the population base is spread out north/south along the coast in a thin line.
The media are too stupid to run the numbers and figure this out. I did it a couple of years ago and looked up the population within a 70 mile radius of Miami and 70 miles of NYC.
In 1993, the Marlins averaged almost 38,000 per game.
Now it's down to 14,384 in 2006.
When I lived in Miami, you were lucky to find a seat to see the Dolphins play (still at the Orange bowl) so if the Marlins aren't bringing in the numbers, it's not a problem of demographics.
At Joe Robbie(I can't bring myself to call it anything else), the Dolphins paid attendance last year was 72,000 tickets sold per game.
The Yankees averaged 51,000 per game last year and the Mets averaged 43,000.
93' was the Marlins first year - they were still a novelty.
The dolphins play maybe 8 home games a year. That makes each one an "event". The Marlins play 80+ home games a year.
As for the Yank/Mets numbers you've just proved my point. What's the population of the greater NYC area versus the greater Miami area? Now figure attendence in terms of a rate per 100K population. The Marlins draw at a higher RATE per unit population than either the Mets or Yankees.
The figures I calculated were approx 1/300 warm bodies within a 70 mile radius of JRS, including invalid, infant, hospitalized, and working night shifts, appear at Marlins games. Approx 1/330 in a 70 mile radius of Yankee stadium appear at Yankee games.
Within the limited south FL population base, the Marlins are drawing as well as anyone could hope for.
Never have to worry about an April snow-out in a dome...
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