Short answer: Yes
Not trying to be a doomer, but l've seen this brought up a lot in game threads after tough home losses. It feels like we always lose special games, whether it be high attendance, retirement parties, World Series anniversaries, etc.
This got me thinking, what part of this is confirmation bias and what is real? I quickly put together a chart of our winning % relative to home attendance.
I'd say the correlation between the two is quite clear, especially if we change the attendance to be measured in 10k increments.
As for cause, I'm sure it's a mix of a lot of things, but the primary is probably the teams we face who are driving up the attendance.
In games with above 30k fans we have faced the following teams:
Yankees 0-3
Cardinals 1-2
Guardians 0-2
Cubs 1-1
Twins 0-1
Padres 0-1
Tigers 1-0
Red Sox 1-0
This results in a 0.286 winning percentage with 30k+ fans in attendance. Those are all good teams, although still teams we should beat more than 29% of the time.
As for "special games", this is arbitrary, but here's all I could think of:
Opening days: 0-2
Playoff games: 0-2
2014 ALCS celebration: W
Bo Jackson Hall of Fame: L
1985/2015 celebration: 0-2
Moose retirement: W
Cags home debut: L
Lo Cain retirement (2023): L
Obviously, it's not like there's a ton of data on this.
The only way we can get more data on this is to drive up attendance!
Data gotten from baseball-reference
2 comments
Wow, confirms what we feel. Doesn’t bode well for the playoffs
I’m going to assume the higher attendance games are marquee matchups, like the Yankees and Cardinals, and the lower attendance games are division games, since we see them a bunch of times every year.