When it comes to reporting on attendance in Major League Baseball, often times, the story of the "why" ticket sales are up and down are often not fully told. In reality, it's the nature of the beast. Everything from who were the starters, to whether there was a promotion, to the weather, and much more, factor.

To try and get a clearer picture, David Simmons has begun a daily tracker that gives a snapshot of the games played the day before. Therefore, the data below is for Tuesday's games.

Note that "Sell-Thru" is the same as percentage of capacity for a given ballpark.

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David Simmons is a graduate of the University of Central Florida who worked in the front office of the Los Angeles Dodgers over 4 seasons and has a decade of ticketing experience.. He serves as CFO for Players For The Planet and currently resides in Baltimore. You can follow David on Twitter @davidesimmons

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, as well as a contributor to FanGraphs and Forbes SportsMoney. He is available for hire or freelance. Brown's full bio is here. He looks forward to your comments via email and can be contacted through the Business of Sports Network.

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In a gaffe that exposed not only personal information of non-season ticket holders but ticket revenues and counts, a ticket representative from the New York Yankees accidently attached a spreadsheet with sensitive information along with a newsletter to approx. 1,500 fellow ticket holders. While no credit card or other financial information about customers were revealed, other personal information, was.

The Yankees sent a letter to the season ticket licensees, reading:

Dear Yankees Season Ticket Licensee,

We are writing to inform you about an accidental electronic distribution of information that you have previously supplied to the New York Yankees.

Monday evening, April 25, 2011, an employee of the Yankees sent an e-mail to several hundred Yankees Season Ticket Licensees. The e-mail mistakenly attached an internal Yankees spreadsheet that listed the following information associated with your New York Yankees account:

• Your name, and the address, phone number(s), fax number, and e-mail address that you previously provided to the Yankees

• Your seat numbers, Yankees account number, Yankees account representative name, and the ticket package code associated with your account

NO OTHER INFORMATION WAS INCLUDED IN THE DOCUMENT THAT WAS ACCIDENTALLY ATTACHED TO THE APRIL 25TH E-MAIL. THE DOCUMENT DID NOT INCLUDE ANY BIRTH DATES, SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS, CREDIT CARD DATA, BANKING DATA, OR ANY OTHER PERSONAL OR FINANCIAL INFORMATION.

Please note, immediately upon learning of the accidental attachment of the internal spreadsheet, remedial measures were undertaken so as to assure that a similar incident could not happen again.

The Yankees deeply regret this incident, and any inconvenience that it might cause.

That alone would be an embarrassing, but within the spreadsheet was other info that sheds light on the state of ticket sales within the Yankees organization.

• The Yankees' total non-premium ticket licensee ticket revenue for far in 2011 is approximately $131,978,910 (plus or minus 1% accuracy due to possible discounting)
• There are 17,686 non-premium subscriber accounts
• There are 26,904 full season equivalents
• There are 21,468 ticket plans
• There are 59,498 ticket plan seats
• 2,179,237 total subscriber tickets sold

Doing a bit of fun math… Non-premium ticket revenue accounts for 65 percent of the $202,689,028 Opening Day salary figure released by USA Today. In other words, if you throw in premium ticket sales, and other revenue streams such as sponsorships, YES, and centralized streams such as national broadcast rights fees and MLB Advanced Media, it’s fairly safe that the Yankees will have (yet another) lucrative season.

As for the ticket rep that inadvertently mailed off the spreadsheet, he tried desperately to recall the email through Microsoft Outlook, but those that weren’t using Outlook got the email anyway. No word on whether the rep was “DFAd” today due to the mistake.

(H/T to Yankee Stadium Insider)

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They say April showers bring May flowers, but Major League Baseball could use more sunshine.

The league is taking an attendance hit, and teams will be playing more double-headers due to the high number if rainouts. As of yesterday, the league has seen 12 rainouts. To place this in perspective, there were just the two rainouts for all of April last season. By the 19th of April of 2010 there were no rainouts.

There have been 3 days where more than one game has been rained out (April 12, 16, and 19) with the 12th seeing three games postponed due to poor weather.

The AL East has been hit the worst with all open-air stadiums seeing at least one postponement. The Yankees have the dubious distinction of being the only club this year to see more than one rainout.

And remember, this doesn’t account for rain delays. MLB is sure to point to some of this as a key reason for the attendance drop early in the 2011 season.

See the table below for each game rained out so far in the 2011 season.

Source: Major League Baseball

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UPDATE: Using ESPN's Team Schedule data for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2010 has uncovered an error. That data (which shows 16,191) as attendance for the 2010 home opener is incorrect. The actual game report on ESPN shows that the game was a sellout of 36,973 (102.6 % of capacity). This article and data has now been updated to refect the correction. (A hat tip to Cork Gaines for addressing the error. -- Maury Brown

Each of Major League Baseball’s 30 clubs have now hosted their Opening Days, and with it paid attendance for the first games totaled for 2011 was 1,310,905, up .3 percent from 1,314,467 on Opening Day in 2010.

Ballparks saw attendance at an average of 101.3 percent capacity on Opening Day, a sign that clubs were able to sell standing room only tickets. Two-thirds of the league saw attendance on Opening Day above 100 percent with the Marlins seeing the largest over normal capacity figure of 41,237 or 113.5 percent of the 32,495 that the Marlins normally allocate in cavernous Sun Life Stadium that also hosts the Miami Dolphins. For a true ballpark where it is not a multi-purpose, such as the Marlins and Athletics play in, the Brewers drew 109.8 of capacity, or 46,017 against the Braves. The “least filled” ballpark on Opening Day was U.S. Cellular Field where the White Sox hosted the Rays. The club drew 38,579 or 95 percent of the ballpark’s 40,615 seating capacity.

In a sign that fans revel in the love a new season, total paid attendance for the game after the season opener was 925,853, a 29.4 drop from Opening Day. Just two clubs (Phillies and Red Sox) saw increases of less than 1 percent (.8% for the Red Sox and .5% for the Phillies). The largest decline from Opening Day to the second game after opener goes to the Cleveland Indians who drew 41,721 on Opening Day against the White Sox, only to free fall to just 9,853 the next day, a decrease of 76.4 percent. The other large decliner was the Baltimore Orioles who saw 46,593 on Opening Day but just 12,451 the next day, a decrease of 73.3 percent against the Tigers. It should be noted that the Orioles lowered seating capacity from 48,290 to 45,971 this year, thus filling Camden Yards to 101.4 percent.

As a matter of comparison, MLB saw an average of 30,138 across 2,424 games last season. Opening Day 2011 drew an average of 43,697, a difference of 13,559 per game.

SELECT READ MORE TO SEE HOME OPENER ATTENDANCE; ATTENDANCE FOR SECOND GAME OF HOME OPENER SERIES; 2010 HOME OPENER ATTENDANCE; BALLPARK CAPACITIES; % OF CAPACITY FOR THE 2011 HOME OPENER, AND; AND % +/- ACROSS THE DATA

Whether it’s the economy beginning to pull back from its chilly ways, increased competitive balance, flexible pricing, or all of the above, according to early season metrics, Major League Baseball is poised to see an attendance rebound this season after seeing declines the last three years.

According to a report in this week’s SportsBusiness Journal, “Commissioner Bud Selig declined to project a specific attendance increase for the season. But after drawing 73.06 million fans in 2010, down 0.4 percent from 2009, this year’s total will likely fall somewhere between 75 million and 78 million, an increase of 3 percent to 7 percent.”

Over the off-season, the league created new panel called the Commissioner’s Ticket Review Committee. That committee has several league departments in play, including, MLBAM and senior executives from six clubs: the Cincinnati Reds, Atlanta Braves, Chicago White Sox, Kansas City Royals, Seattle Mariners and Cleveland Indians.

As the report notes, there are still question marks, namely around the New York Mets who are fighting off the Trustee working to gain monies back as part of the Bernie Madoff scandal. Ownership was deeply involved with Madoff. On top of the legal battles, attendance has been down considerably since moving into Citi Field – 19 percent. The club has  employed ticket discounts to try and gain fans back.

Early numbers show that the Twins already sold more than 2.9 million tickets for 2011, and as expected, after winning the World Series for the first time since moving to the West Coast, the San Francisco Giants are seeing robust sales. Other increases have been with the Texas Rangers, and Brewers, who in mid-January had reached one million tickets sold for the 2011 season, which tied the 2009 season for the earliest date that the club had achieved the milestone in franchise history.

“I’m really bullish on this season. We’ve got some great empirical data coming in,” Selig said to the SBJ. “I want to see a nice increase this year, and I’m very hopeful, very optimistic and confident that we’re going to do it. It should be a big, big year.”

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, as well as a contributor to FanGraphs and Forbes SportsMoney. He is available for hire or freelance. Brown's full bio is here. He looks forward to your comments via email and can be contacted through the Business of Sports Network.

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