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Are The Cardinals Addicted To Crowds?

Posted on September 4, 2010 at 10:52 AM
Filed Under: St. Louis Cardinals
After seeing this Cardinals team again play to their level of competition, rebounding from the 2-8 road trip against cellar dwellers and beating the first-place Reds in Busch Stadium, I thought of something: what if, instead of the problem being the competition, was the crowds.

Think about it.  The Cards play well at home--which most teams do, of course--and there are large crowds there cheering them on.  They played well in the Cincinnati series--with a large crowd at least bringing energy to the park.  However, they played lousy on this road trip, in stadiums where half full is typically a good night.

I'm no baseball researcher and Pip is likely to snicker at my methodology (and my conclusions), but I went through the box scores last night and made a basic spreadsheet.  I jotted down the team, the crowd (as a percentage of capacity), the runs scored and the runs allowed, as well as whether they won or lost the game.

If my theory held up, you would expect to see a larger winning percentage when the crowds were good and decreased performances in sparsely attended ballgames.  The results....well, just like this team, they were decidedly mixed.

On the surface, there seemed to be something to this idea.  Using the cutoff of 80% capacity, figuring that was as good of a place as any to draw a line of demarcation between "good crowd" and "bad crowd", we see this:

80% and greater: .589 winning percentage, 4.7 runs/game scored, 3.6 runs/game allowed
79% and less: .378 winning percentage, 4.41 runs/game scored, 4.43 runs/game allowed

OK, so that's what the issue is, right?  The Cardinals feed off of the energy of the crowd, either home or away, and have trouble "getting up" for games that no one is at.  If we stopped there, it would seem the results bear out the theory.

However, as this is the first Saturday of college football (for those who care), it seems only appropriate to say, "Not so fast, my friend."

First off, no crowd in Busch has been less than 80.2 percent.  That means all of the games in the 79% or less range are road games, which most teams are worse at.  It's hard to know how much that is related to the other road variables and how much to a lesser crowd.

In road games that had 80% or more capacity, the Cardinals still went 13-15.  That .464 winning percentage is significantly higher than their .418 overall mark.  So perhaps a larger crowd does help a little bit on the road, though not enough to overcome all the other road obstacles.

Secondly, you'd think the bigger the crowd, the more likely they are to pull off a win.  Looking at the substrata of the large crowds, though, that doesn't seem to be the case.

100%+: 14-10, AM 1.13
90-100%: 24-19, AM 0.70
80-90%: 18-10, AM 1.82

AM is average margin, the difference between average runs per game scored and average runs per game allowed.  Interestingly, the Cards have played their best baseball when the stadium is pretty full, but not overflowing.

Another thing you might think would tie to the crowd size would be the Redbirds' record in the most attended game of the series.  Even small crowds look better when compared to smaller crowds.

However, it is pretty much a wash.  The Cards are 21-21-1 in the most attended game of the series (two games with the Angels tied at 100.3 and the Cardinals split them) and they are 23-20 in the lowest attended game.  Nothing much there.

Finally, I looked at how the team did when the attendance jumped or dropped dramatically between games.  Coming from Houston's half-full park, last night's almost-capacity crowd at Busch would have been a jolt, I expect.  So the Cardinals should do better in games where the crowd percentage increases by 20% and do worse when it drops by that number.

Eh, not so much.

Increases by 20%: 8-6
Decreases by 20%: 10-5

Granted, when it decreases by 20, St. Louis is likely going on the road to a weaker opponent, such as Pittsburgh or Arizona.  However, since the Redbirds have had trouble both with the road and with weaker opponents, seeing that increase in decreased by 20% games is really counterintuitive.

So, what have I proved with all of this?  Basically, that I know how to waste a Friday night.  There doesn't seem to be any correlation between the energy of the crowd and the results on the field.


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    Cardinal Nation Approval Ratings (March 2011)
    Adam Wainwright 94.7% (down 0.9%)
    Matt Holliday 91.1% (up 6.6%)
    Albert Pujols 90.4% (down 8.3%)
    Dave Duncan 87.9% (up 0.9%)
    Derrick Goold 87.8%
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