I've been reading a lot recently about the Tampa Bay Rays, and how most of their success is based on their "home-grown" talent. This got me thinking about how well the Angels did in composing their team from within their own organization. Of the 41 players who made an appearance in an Angels' game in 2008, twenty-eight were either drafted or signed as an amateur free agent by the Halos. In other words, 68% of the players have never played for another team or within another team's organization. Tampa Bay on the other hand had 46 players appear in a Rays game, of those 46, nineteen were home-grown players (41%). Looking into this a little deeper, and at how the other playoff teams were constructed, I came up with these figures:
| Team | Drafted/Signed | Other Org. | Pct. |
| Angels | 28 | 13 | 68% |
| Boston | 15 | 32 | 32% |
| Tampa | 19 | 27 | 41% |
| Chicago White Sox | 10 | 29 | 26% |
| Philadelphia | 16 | 24 | 40% |
| Los Angeles | 23 | 23 | 50% |
| Chicago Cubs | 17 | 25 | 40% |
| Milwaukee | 17 | 27 | 39% |
|
Average |
145 | 200 | 42% |
As noted in his daily ESPN blog, Buster Olney mentions that not only had the Rays done a good job with players from within their organization, but the Phillies have done just as well. Which is true as the above numbers suggest. When looking at those numbers, I was kind of surprised by the fact that the Dodgers were so high on the list. When making the assumption that smaller market teams would use more players from within their organizations because they are cheaper, the Dodgers ranking made me look at this a bit deeper and led to the question of Organizational Efficiency. How efficient were teams using their resources for success?
Baseball teams are in the business to make money. This isn't a big revelation. Baseball is a business who's sole purpose is to make the team's owners money. Regardless of what an owner says about winning, civic pride, or championships, their bottom line is revenue and profit. I'm going to make some general assumptions, so please bare with me as I'm not a mathematical genius, or business tycoon. A team's revenue is based primarily on attendance. The more butts in the seats the more cash in the pocket. In order to have good attendance, a winning product usually has to be put on the market...a winning team. To have a winning team, an organization typically has a higher payroll or has the resources from within the organization to provide better talent than the other teams.
Draft success/Payroll → Winning Team → Attendance → Revenue
Nothing groundbreaking there. As I, or anyone for that matter, has access to each team's financial numbers, the next step in the process is attendance. Here are each team's attendance figures for the last 5 seasons:
| NY Yankees | 20,683,793 | Chicago Sox | 12,415,827 | |
| LA Dodgers | 18,438,063 | Texas | 11,727,202 | |
| St. Louis | 16,979,616 | Baltimore | 11,636,794 | |
| LA Angels | 16,889,532 | Arizona | 11,505,842 | |
| NY Mets | 16,424,415 | Colorado | 11,383,288 | |
| Chicago Cubs | 15,946,023 | Toronto | 10,977,678 | |
| San Francisco | 15,655,242 | Minnesota | 10,829,565 | |
| Philadelphia | 15,148,119 | Cincinnati | 10,482,149 | |
| Houston | 14,715,287 | Cleveland | 10,271,831 | |
| Boston | 14,634,775 | Washington | 9,898,811 | |
| San Diego | 13,763,905 | Oakland | 9,874,359 | |
| Seattle | 13,149,280 | Pittsburgh | 8,617,043 | |
| Detroit | 12,787,150 | Kansas City | 7,601,086 | |
| Atlanta | 12,677,297 | Florida | 7,445,434 | |
| Milwaukee | 12,546,650 | Tampa Bay | 6,985,119 |
How did these teams draw fans? Outside of the large market teams of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago who have the largest fan base to draw from, teams such as Houston, San Diego and Milwaukee draw fans by putting a winning product on the field. That's not to say that the larger market teams don't need to win to draw fans, obviously they do, but I think there are fans who will go to games regardless of how well the team is doing. With a larger market to draw from, there are more of these "diehard" fans to attend games. To draw customers above the "diehard" fan level, a team has to field a product people are interested in, and people are interested in winning.
(note: I'm going to write this series in parts because there's going to be a lot of numbers. Numbers tend to bog down the "readability" of postings, but in this instance the numbers are important. Part 2 will look at winning and how efficient teams are at getting their win totals.)
Your daughter is applying for a PR internship with the Angels organization. If she gets it maybe she can help them put more butts in the seats! I hope she gets it so I can get my butt into some good seats next season...haha!
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OK, he's open and confident, he's not going to sit on the sidelines or separate himself from us.' Then we saw how he was in games. He's sitting next to me and we're talking about pitchers and tendencies. It's like, 'OK, this guy is a baseball player. All business. Loves the game.' This guy is perfect for this team
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