The Houston Astros have announced that George Postolos has resigned as President and CEO of the club. Postolos was cited as being instrumental in working with Astros Owner and Chairman Jim Crane and his group in the purchase of the Astros, had been Astros President and CEO since November of 2011. He worked for seven years with Crane to acquire a sports franchise.

“I am very proud of what Jim accomplished with my help – acquiring a major league franchise with a strong and diverse ownership group, developing and implementing a good plan for the team’s future, and assembling a first rate management team,” Postolos said. “I look forward to helping other investors pursue their objectives in sports knowing that Jim and the Astros organization are off to a great start and well positioned for future success.” 

Postolos will be returning to his consulting practice advising investors on acquisitions and strategy in major league sports. There is currently no information on a successor or plans to search for one, although the possibility is there that it could happen in the coming days. A looming question that will inevitably surface is the status of former Astros and Rangers Hall of Fame pitcher, Nolan Ryan. Ryan, who was reportedly on the edge of resigning from the Rangers as CEO after the  Rangers promoted general manager Jon Daniels and Rick George, said just after the start of the season that he was staying with the organization, but it’s unclear what—if anything—was done to make that contractually binding.

During his tenure with the Astros, Postolos spearheaded several changes within the organization, including the Astros overall rebranding process, which included new team uniforms, colors and logos. Postolos also revamped the marketing and foundation departments and emphasized the importance of feedback from Astros fans, taking part in several face-to-face meetings with Astros season ticket holders and long-time fans. 

Under his guidance, the Astros nearly tripled the size of the ticket sales staff dedicated to providing relationship-based services to their clients.

“We appreciate George’s hard work in the acquisition of the Astros and his commitment to the organization,” Crane said. “I’d also like to personally thank him for the assistance that he has provided to me over the last several years and wish him the best of luck in the future.” 

More details as they become available.

Maury Brown is the Founder and President of the Business of Sports Network, which includes The Biz of Baseball, The Biz of Football, The Biz of Basketball and The Biz of Hockey. He writes for Baseball Prospectus and is a contributor to Forbes. He is available as a freelance writer. Brown's full bio is here. He looks forward to your comments via email and can be contacted here.

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I worry for the revisionist history that is now being made and will be chronicled in books about sports. Those researching to make a case for or against the popularity of one or the other will look to attendance figures as a way to say how many fans went to view games as they happened in ballparks, stadiums, and arenas at the time. Those that may have actually been at a particular event will have a different view than what is published. They’ll see more empty seats than history reports.

This is not some objective matter (although the amount one sees isn't an exacting science). The fact is, the announced number at virtually every pro and colligate sporting event is vastly higher than the actually number of fans that are there.

Since the ‘90s, Major League Baseball has counted “paid attendance” or the number of tickets sold, rather than how many people were actually at the ballpark. This coincided with the adoption of revenue-sharing. The logic works like this: what really matters to the owners and the league is how much ticket revenue is generated that then counts towards revenue-sharing totals. At least MLB doesn’t count comps, VIPs, and media as other leagues and colleges do, but that doesn’t mean MLB doesn’t count deeply discounted tickets in the announced paid attendance figures just the same as one that is paid at full price.

So, to the owners and the league, the matter is one of tracking the ledger. The problem is, they’re more than happy to use the numbers to paint a different picture. Here’s the first sentence of a press release last year touting overall attendance health (bolding by author):

Major League Baseball announced today that the 30 Clubs drew 74,859,268 fans in the 2012 regular season, representing the game’s highest attendance since 2008 and the fifth best single-season attendance in Baseball history.

This simply isn’t so. What happened was nearly 75 million tickets were sold. Not that many attended.

In fact, numbers have swirled about that no-show rates can be as high as approx. 17 percent. If that were true, and we apply it to MLB’s totals for the 2012 season, we get this:

17% of 74,859,268 tickets sold = 62,133,192 actual fans attended

It’s this difference of approx.12.7 million fans that is at issue. You could make a case that MLB (and for that matter, the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLS, et al) should announce in the box score the actual number of fans that attended the games. After all, the paid attendance figure is really only for internal purposes, so keep the numbers that way… internal. The reason that the league won’t announce actual numbers is that it would be a PR nightmare. As it stands, there have been several games that have had paid attendance announced at under 10,000. Reporting actual attendance of around 8,000-8,500 a game would be a massive black eye.

In fairness, not every ballpark sees no-shows. As mentioned, MLB does not count comps, VIPs, or media in the paid attendance figures. In the case of some clubs that are seeing wild popularity, a ballpark can be over capacity with nothing but standing room only available. Those SROs get counted as “paid attendance” as one has to purchase a ticket to get in.

Still, this is more the exception, not the rule. There are far more ballparks with less people in them than announced as opposed to more. So, your eyes aren’t lying, the box score is. The leagues will rationalize this as a change that needed to take place for accounting purposes, but you can darn well believe that if the numbers somehow came out negatively so, they’d not use them. They numbers announced at each game prop up the attendance numbers… history be damned. Just try to remember that in the future when you read books on a given sports popularity. Ghosts in the seats don’t count.

Maury Brown is the Founder and President of the Business of Sports Network, which includes The Biz of Baseball, The Biz of Football, The Biz of Basketball and The Biz of Hockey. He writes for Baseball Prospectus and is a contributor to Forbes. He is available as a freelance writer. Brown's full bio is here. He looks forward to your comments via email and can be contacted here.

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Early yesterday, we reported how in just the second year of a new ballpark, the Miami Marlins were on pace to potentially see the largest attendance drop between first and second year for a new facility. Based on dumping of player payroll after lavishing money in the 2010-11 offseason the Marlins could see a decline of more than 38 percent, which would break the record held by in-state neighbor, the Tampa Bay Rays from 1998 to 1999 (see the table showing the 23 ballparks opened since 1991).

Now comes word that due to the drop off, the Marlins will be tarping off the upper deck of the ballpark opened just last April. According to Barry Jackson of The Miami Herald:

The upper bowl will be closed for six dates in the team’s nine-game homestand that begins next Tuesday. Fans can sit only in the lower bowl for games May 14-16 against Cincinnati and May 20-22 against Philadelphia. The upper bowl will remain open for May 17-19 games against Arizona.

Marlins representative P.J. Loyello said the team has not decided whether to close the upper bowl for all Monday through Thursday home games, and decisions will be made before each home stand.

Jackson notes what we were already thinking on this: it means less staff to support the upper bowl, meaning not only are the Marlins seeing lagging attendance, they’re about to put some seasonal workers at the ballpark off the clock, meaning the Marlins will save money on staff costs.

The Marlins are not the first to tarp off part of a ballpark due to attendance concerns, but are far and away the earliest at doing so. The Oakland A’s do so in their multi-purpose stadium that they share with the Raiders (53,200 capacity for the Raiders, while the A’s knocked seating capacity to 34,077 after tarping off 20,878 seats), as have the Tampa Bay Rays (tarping off  5,000 seats in the upper deck of Tropicana Field). The Marlins also did so prior when they were in Sun Life Stadium, sharing the facility with the Dolphins. Clubs do not need clearance from Major League Baseball to artificially constrain seating capacity.

Fire Sale Killing Off Potential Businesses Around Ballpark

In related news, while the idea of ballparks as key economic drivers is something that we’ve often said is simply not true, the fire sale moves of the Marlins have exacerbated the problem. Charles Rabin reports for the Miami Herald:

Now, more than a year since the Marlins first opened the gates to the new Little Havana ballpark — and four years after city and county leaders crowed that building the stadium would be an economic shot in the arm for the area — not a single business is operating in the 8,500 square feet of retail space available in three of the four garages fronting the ballpark.

“Obviously, the Marlins didn’t help in regards to their off-season moves,” said Miami Parking Authority Chief Executive Art Noriega, whose semi-autonomous agency manages the garages. “Then everything went ice cold.”

The report goes on to say that chain Marco’s Pizza had a letter of intent to sign a lease but when owner Jeffrey Loria conducted the salary dump last year, the business pulled out.

A week after the November trade, leasing agent Arthur Stevens of Terranova Corp., the firm hired by the city to lure clients to the ballpark, expressed concern about Marco’s Pizza making good on its letter of intent to sign a lease.

“Marco’s is very concerned about what this will do to future attendance,’’ Stevens, who has since left the firm, wrote to the city’s public facilities director, Henry Torre. “Just thought you should know, I’ll keep you posted.”

Marco’s cut and ran.

Two months later, in January, Stevens again expressed concern over a client, this time a national restaurant chain named Firefly.

“While we want to do the deal with the Marlins, their investors are worried about the negative impact that the new Marlins team will have on overall traffic, attendance. One of their investors has contacts within who continues to hear not so good things,” Stevens wrote Henry in an email.

A few weeks later, Firely opted out.

We know the Marlins like living on welfare, and there’s documents to prove they never were in need of the free ride they got from the taxpayers for the new ballpark to begin with. As to Loria saying the players that were signed and promptly unloaded weren’t working out, it makes us ask, when exactly did the Marlins lose their minds?

Maury Brown is the Founder and President of the Business of Sports Network, which includes The Biz of Baseball, The Biz of Football, The Biz of Basketball and The Biz of Hockey. He writes for Baseball Prospectus and is a contributor to Forbes. He is available as a freelance writer. Brown's full bio is here. He looks forward to your comments via email and can be contacted here.

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Today on Baseball Prospectus, I delve into the Miami Marlins self-inflicted attendance woes (see Bizball: The Marlins Sinking Attendance). The early decline could rate as historic by the end of the season as they could challenge the then Tampa Bay Devil Rays as the worst attendance decline in the second year of a new ballpark. As I write for BP:

In poll after poll, column after column, Jeffrey Loria is ranked as the worst owner in all of North American professional sports.

Loria is bad for fans, but he treats himself and the partners in the club well. He and club president David Samson were able to bamboozle politicians and taxpayers in Miami-Dade County to the tune of $500 million for a brand-spanking-new ballpark on the former site of the Orange Bowl. They opened up last season in that freshly minted stadium after being the darlings of the 2011 Baseball Winter Meetings, at which they signed SS Jose Reyes to a six-year, $106 million deal, starter Mark Buehrle to a four-year, $58 million contract; and closer Heath Bell to a three-year, $27 million deal with an option for 2015. All told, the Marlins splurged $191 million at the meetings, and it could have been more, as it looked for bit like they were going after Albert Pujols. Imagine that.

In mid-November of last year, the club promptly moved Reyes (2013: $10M, 2014: $16M, 2015: $22M, 2016: $22M, 2017: $22M, 2018: $22M club option with $4M buyout), Josh Johnson (2013: $13.75M), Buehrle (2013: $11M, 2014: $18M, 2015: $19M plus a $4M deferred signing bonus), John Buck (2013: $6M), and Emilio Bonifacio (who is arbitration eligible this year), and $4 million (or potentially more) in cash to the Blue Jays for Yunel Escobar, Henderson Alvarez, Adeiny Hechavarria, Jeff Mathis, minor-league pitchers Justin Nicolino and Anthony Desclafani, and minor-league outfielderJake Marisnick. All told, the Marlins stripped $163.75 million off the books, and the baseball world screamed “fire sale” at a club that at one point was featured on Showtime’s “The Franchise” and had Ozzie Guillen as its manager. Loria had done what Loria had always done before: make rash decisions, all of which soil any chance of creating goodwill in the community. And the Marlins, in their best Stuart Smalley, looked at themselves in the mirror and said, “Doggone it, people like me.”

With that as the backdrop, I made some predictions before the season started on Twitter that weren’t that much of a leap to make. I said the Marlins wouldn’t sell out a single game this season (since Opening Day wasn’t a sellout, chances are good they won’t get one going forward), and added that they would see largest drop in attendance for a second-year ballpark among all MLB stadiums built in the last 25 years.

As of today, the decline would be 31 percent below what the club ended with last season. But, they are currently averaging 18,864. As of May 5 of last season, they were averaging 30,681, down 11,817 from the previous year, or a decline of 39 percent.

So, it’s very possible the Marlins could end worse than the Rays. It’s early, and anything could happen, but odds are good the Marlins aren’t going to get any better in the standings and Loria certainly didn’t make any extra friends in the offseason.

Below shows every new ballpark built under the Selig tenure. It shows the average attendance prior to the new ballpark opening in the old ballpark; average attendance in the first year of the new ballpark; the winning percentage in the first year of the ballpark; average attendance in the second year of the new ballpark, and finally; the percentage of increase or decrease from the opening year in the new ballpark. As of now, the Marlins are averaging just 92 more per game than their last year in Sun Life Stadium that they shared with the Miami Dolphins, was never designed for baseball, and had no roof.

* Not full season
** Current (5/6/13)

Maury Brown is the Founder and President of the Business of Sports Network, which includes The Biz of Baseball, The Biz of Football, The Biz of Basketball and The Biz of Hockey. He writes for Baseball Prospectus and is a contributor to Forbes. He is available as a freelance writer. Brown's full bio is here. He looks forward to your comments via email and can be contacted here.

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I probably should have written this article last year. Being that I was weaned on Rush, that forward look at MLB would have been 2112. We could have talked about how the Temple of Syrinx player payroll of $1.5 billion was over the $1.2 billion salary cap, but they said, “Don’t annoy us further, we have our work to do. Just think about the [batting] average. What use has they for you?”

But, the vision didn’t come then. It came today. I was standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, the porcelain was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the sink, and when I came to I had a revelation! A vision! A picture in my head! A picture of this! It’s baseball 100 years from now!

Bud Selig is Still Commissioner of Baseball

No, Selig is not immortal, but after they brought Ted Williams back to life (he’s playing for the Yankees, as is half of today’s line up), the league’s owners scrambled and did the same for Selig. “As I have said many times, I plan on retiring when my contract is up in 2116. I have moved the A’s and Giants issue about the Athletics moving to San Jose back on the front burner,” but as Selig added, “These things take time, and I don’t believe in rushing.”

The Bullpen Hover Cart

As Doc Brown foresaw with the DeLorean, a hovercraft will become standard travel in the future. Longing for a retro feel at the ballpark, the bullpen cart will make its return, with a modern touch… they’ll hover. “Clubs were worried that driving the cart on this Kentucky Bluegrass, Featherbed Bent, and Northern California Sensemilia that, whaddaya know from Caddyshack, actually worked, would be damaged by driving over it,“ said one exec off record. “Even though we cut off pot smoking at the end of the 7th inning, we still need to harvest that stuff as it’s a key revenue driver, especially in San Francisco.”

The World Series

Baseball has yet to make its way back into the Olympics, but MLB finally got a World Series. After expanding to 52 teams, with the last being Montreal, the league reaches around the globe. Reached for comment, NFL Commissioner Tim Tebow II, chuckled, “We’re expanding the NFL beyond the moon to Mars next year. Baseball has a ways to go.”

The Bandbox Becomes the Norm

After the Cubs completed the renovation to Wrigley Field, the rest of the league continued to look around and say, “You know what? Size really doesn’t matter. Small ballparks, do.” In 2113 the average ballpark size will be under 5,000. The reason? Television will be so good, you can play archives of FOX games and punch a holographic image of Tim McCarver. Why would anyone want to see games live?

CBA with RoboUmps Not Reached

The 2113 season will get underway but only after a tentative extension of the CBA between the Robo Umpires Association (RBUA) is reached. “We get a bum rap for showboating and getting into it with the players, but when we’re only missing about half as many calls as the human umpires once were, we’ve got a mechanical leg to stand on.”

Every Ballpark Has a Retractable Roof

With pressure to ensure walkups, in the future all ballparks will have a retractable roof. Made of special holographic material, even when it rains, inside it will look as if it’s sunny. The last club to go this route was the Padres. “We can’t take any chances. Even though it’s been at least 30 years since our last rainout, taxpayers knew that if we weren’t competitive with the other clubs in the league, we were going to have to relocate to Brazil,” said the CEO of PETCO Family and Life, the corporate owner of the club.

Public Executions for the Wave during the 7th Inning Stretch

The Wave will become a capital crime. Anyone caught trying to start it during a game is rounded up and publicly executed in center field during the 7th inning stretch. The olde hymnal, “Walk” by Pantera is played.

Artificial Limbs Are the New PEDs

A player received a season long suspension after testing positive for an artificial limb made to look like it was human but in reality had the power of a gorilla. “These players have to understand, our testing is accurate and we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to gorilla arms,” said Commissioner Selig. “We had our suspicions when the player in question had 45 home runs in 50 at bats.” The MLBPA is appealing.

All Games Are Now Under 2 Hours, Yankees and Red Sox Contracted

Baseball, finally realizing they had a problem with the length of games being too long, takes drastic action and contracts the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Hall of Fame Opens “Hall of Shame” Wing Focused on Loria

People are not perfect, and so goes baseball. After much deliberation, the Baseball Hall of Fame opens a new “Hall of Shame” wing highlighting the worst the game has endured. “It seems only fitting that a large portion of this new display focuses on Jeffery Loria,” said the head of the HOF. “We’re very proud to have this antique home run structure that was in centerfield at Marlins Park be the centerpiece.” According to sources, it took several old drawings and 10 peyote caps for architects to reconstruct it.”

The Cubs

The Cubs finally win the World Series after 204 years of drought. It is declared a national holiday. Baseball fans weep, and talk about how great the game still is. It hasn’t really changed. From the US to territories in the outer quadrant, fans still love the game.

Maury Brown is the Founder and President of the Business of Sports Network, which includes The Biz of Baseball, The Biz of Football, The Biz of Basketball and The Biz of Hockey. He writes for Baseball Prospectus and is a contributor to Forbes. He is available as a freelance writer. Brown's full bio is here. He looks forward to your comments via email and can be contacted here.

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The Business of Sports Network is undergoing a restructuring that will see several independent sites closed down.  The Biz of Football, The Biz of Basketball, and The Biz of Hockey will soon close as independent sites. These URLs will remain associated to the Business of Sports Network. The Biz of Baseball will not be affected, and will remain in its current format.

Following the site shutdowns, a new site that covers all sports under one location will be created. Documents and other artifacts that were on the football, basketball, and hockey sites will then be moved there.  Content from The Biz of Baseball will also be repurposed or summarized in this new site location, BusinessOfSportsNetwork.com.

We believe that in doing so, not only will we continue to provide support for basketball, football, and hockey, but branch into all aspects of sports business under one portal, allowing ease of access and continued growth.

We want to thank all those that have continued to support the Business of Sports Network, and we look forward to providing this fresh, new website in the coming days.

Best regards,
Maury Brown
President
Business of Sports Network
Bizball LLC

Maury Brown is the Founder and President of the Business of Sports Network, which includes The Biz of Baseball, The Biz of Football, The Biz of Basketball and The Biz of Hockey. He writes for Baseball Prospectus and is a contributor to Forbes. He is available as a freelance writer. Brown's full bio is here. He looks forward to your comments via email and can be contacted here.

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