Cubs Vs. Sox
In Chicago, no matter how the teams do, the Cubs are the most popular baseball team in town.
The June 15th Wall Street Journal had an article
on this facet of the Chicago sports scene, something which is frustrating to Sox fans, players, and officials. Even when
the Sox are having a good season, White
Sox fans don’t come to the park like Cubs fans do.
This post supplements my post here at The Sports Economist. I describe, in a bit more detail, the data that I used to examine the demand for Cubs and Sox games and the models that I examined.
I ran several regressions on yearly attendance for the years 1970-2002 for the Cubs and the Sox. The models represent simple demand equations. To explain the variation in team attendance, I used the following variables: the real price of tickets (a weighted average ticket price that accounts for differences in price by seat location), lagged team winning percentage, current team winning percentage, team slugging percentage, walks by pitchers, strikeouts by pitchers, the age of the stadium (quadratic), and dummy variables for the strike years (1994 and 1995), the Cubs, and the White Sox since 1994. I ran three models using all the variables: and OLS model, a random effects model, and a fixed effects model. I ran an OLS model as well as a random effects model. Since I did not have the ticket prices for either team for 1989 and 1990 and since the coefficients on the real ticket price were insignificant, I re-ran both models excluding that variable. That also gave me four more observations to work with for these two models. Here is a pdf file that contains the results of the regressions.
Summary of the findings:
Cubs and Sox fans prefer winning teams
Cubs and Sox fans like offense
As the stadium ages, attendance decreases but at an increasing rate (i.e. the slope levels off)
White Sox attendance since 1994 has fallen off, evidence that fans hold a grudge against Jerry Reinsdorf for his part in the 1994 strike.
Simply put, Chicagoans prefer the Cubs.
Read more here at the Sports Economist.
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