Taking attendance

While I keep working on developing my play-by-play database, which I hope will support new types of analyses, let me offer you something completely different.

Ever wonder what the average attendance was at IBL games? How it varied by team and location? And so on?

I've been playing with the official attendance figures, and I think they have some interesting stories to tell.

For starters, I'll show you the graph of daily total attendance: Total reported attendance at all games played for each day of the season.

Now, I don't know how accurate these figures are. Kids in youth baseball t-shirts were admitted free - were they counted in the attendance figures? Sometimes the ticket booth was empty and people walked in freely, perhaps to be reminded later to buy a ticket, perhaps not. At the championship game, we walked from the car to the gate without being asked to show our tickets. So actual attendance may be higher than reported. But these are all the figures we have, so they'll have to do.

Without further commentary, the total attendance graph (click to enlarge). The all-star game and postseason are shown in green. The column bars for opening day and the championship game have been cut short to make the rest of the chart easier to read.

See if you can identify any interesting patterns. I've got some up my sleeve for a subsequent post.