You buy season tickets based on how good you THINK the team might be.
Once bought and paid for winning and losing doesn’t play all that much into how many games you actually go to see! You paid for them and you will likely use those tickets! Sure you may waste a few (or many depending on if you bought FULL season or Partial) if they have a horrible season. But even in the BEST of times and winning people who buy Full Season waste tickets they never use and only the act of giving them away or selling them is easier if they are a winning team.

But once bought before the first game is played one way or another they have the revenue from that sale in the bank. And Most people will not stay away when they paid good money to get the seats.

This is why I constantly say the Season Ticket Sales are the key to financial security!
Winning and losing will affect the gravy those sales may include and will affect day of game sales because who goes to see a team that isn’t winning? They go up whe they do Yes but they are more like the Gravy than the meat that Season Tickets are!

Now lets say they sell fewer season tickets but the team starts winning ballgames…
How much of the season has to pass BEFORE the fans decide a team that thought wasn’t worth seeing is now worth paying to see? Is a Month enough? Does it take Two Months? Truth is no one starts believing in the wins until Late June or July which means half the season had low attendance and the team is forced to make up for that the last half of the season!

Our highest home draw was 42K vs the Yankees pretty much max!

Our lowest draw in July (When they were playing .593 baseball was July 20th at 30K and our Highest was 41K vs the Phillies on the 16th
After July 28th (very next homstand and after Beltran got traded) 21K on August 8th Two days after Reyes and Murphy went down! Our Highest was 33.5 the Day Reyes and Murphy got hurt vs Atlanta!
And it never went as high as 33.5K except once against Chicago on Sept 11th which we all know drew for many other reasons other than star power or their win/loss record.

So It is quite clear once we lost our best players people simply did not go anymore either because they wasted tickets they bought or decided there was no point.

And until we have someone who can inspire them to buy season tickets they will not want to waste or until we win enough meaning there are NEW stars shining at Citi, there is no way we are going to draw what we need to draw to pay the bills!
So bye bye Wright, Niese and possibly even Davis Duda and Murphy.

They need to find ways of getting people into the stands not find ways to deal with the lack of money that lack of attendance problem brings!

Attendance will go down, Losses will go up and when it hits bottom there STILL won’t be enough money to get out of it!
We will just have dug the financial and attendance hole so deep that not even paying for the best FA avaialble will make a dent in the attendance problem.

You fix the attendance and you fix the finances. We made money even spending more than 140 Mil in 2006-2009. It isn’t the salary that bankrupted us and it sure wasn’t madoff, they didn’t cause the problem.
Their only relevance is they might have been a solution if they had kept giving fans hope after 2008 or if madoff stayed around so they could make easy cash to dio that and investing in something better than Jason Bay!

In 2009 the Mets sold out most of the stadium but by July it was a ghost town. Tickets were sold but no one went. 2010 most people renewed but again, even playing decent ball for half the season Citi became a ghost town. 2011 many people didn’t renew. Now it’s just going to get worse. The Mets are really between in a tough situation. Season ticket holders are pissed off that people can sit next to them while paying half price for their tickets than they do so you can’t anger them yet without incentives no one’s going anyway. The only solution is to give season ticket holder free tickets and better seats and slash to the bone all the upper deck seats to get people in.

There is no question that the Stadium was built on the idea of decreasing supply in order to increase demand. The whole “secure your seats to Citi” BS in Shea’s last couple of seasons has had a backlash and so has the constant con job of bringing in “big stars” which brings in big expectations followed by big disappointment.

If you go out to eat and you both love the restaurant and keep going but eventually it becomes more disappointing than fun are you going to keep going there? Then you find out that the people at other tables who’ve never gone are paying half price.

The Wilpon’s should just clear the upper deck of all paying subscriptions and do whatever is necessary to put an ass in a seat while giving season subscribers a free seat for each ticket they pay for until this thing can get sorted out.

My big fear is that come the NYY series this place will be Yankee Stadium east and set the brand so far back it will take a decade to undo the damage.

People always say that you can’t rebuild in NY but that is such BS. The thing you can’t do is not ever win in NY. At some point you have to put out a consistently good product and keep it good for a reasonable length of time in order to build up the goodwill that will carry you through the inevitable lean years.

People are hip to the con job of artificially inflating the fan base’s hopes by bringing in a “big star.” What we want is a well conceived team that can withstand injuries, competiton for under performing players and guys that are here in their prime for 6-10 years. Not just another iffy big name every January.

JoeD – You miss the point of their bitching they aren’t interested in stopping the snark they are only interested in being able to snark without retribution or being out snarked back! Snark is really all some posters have! That and antogonization! They merely come to push some buttons hoping to start an explosion then complain to you about the poster in hopes you will silence them and remove their nemesis!

And I fall for it plenty so lets not think I don’t hold myself innocent on making snarky comments from time to time! SOmetime I respond to snark with snark! I’m from Brooklyn and we were born to fight you know! LOL Be thankful that I don’t use my native vernacular as well! LOL

They didn’t solve the REAL problem with finances which is attendance!
They are making that situation worse and cutting off the overhead which creates more losses not less!

What the impact will be is not important, what is important that they made the financial situation worse not better and while spending an extra 10-12 mil to merely maintain might not be profitable it is enough to maintain what DOES draw so that you can replace other players who do not draw with players who do and will draw enough over that LOW DRAW player to pay for reyes and himself!

This is an entertainment business and it is based on people coming to see the entertainment.
Movies hire stars not because they are the best actor on the planet because there are a lot of unknowns who may be better actors!
They hire the STARS because sight unseen they bring people out to see your product!

You hire a star and the product could be crap but you still get that attendance to go to see it before they know it is crap!
And if the star is good they will tell everyone to go see them as well!

We talk about business here but forget exactly what kind of business it is!
It is a STAR DRIVEN business that without stars has to have a really good product to make up for it’s lack of star power. And if it does that what really happens is that NEW STARS are created from that good product!

If Ike Davis and Lucas Duda hit 50 HRs each then 2013 might have higher attendance regardless of the wins the team had!
But they are not stars yet and all the stars we had are gone. People are going to wait to see if there are any beofr they buy tickets and by then the attendance will be too late!

You don’t have a thing to worry about….

It was directed at those who know exactly who they are.

Anyone can reasonable deduce that no Reyes doesn’t mean ticket sales will spike or bring fans to the park now that he is gone. I mean come on do we even have to ask that?

I have said and continue to say that I can’t speculate into how much an effect Reyes will have on ticket sales. If you want to I am not going to disagree with you. I thought it was obvious we were discussing the lack of Reyes and ticket sales in the negative aspect at no point did I think you would consider that I even thought not having Reyes could cause a spike in sales or bring more fans out now that he is gone.

I apologize for not thinking you could of even thought that but I can assure you I do not think not signing Reyes will cause a spike in sales or draw fans back that stood away cause he was on the team.

Also, don’t act surprised if your comments suddenly go into moderation.

Just a more or less guess!

As I pointed out to Jessup
Yes attendance went down in the last few years but not BECAUSE of Reyes.
Attendance has remained ABOVE 2004 Levels where Reyes and Wright were the main draws as Floyd was hurt and Piazza was clearly reaching the end of the road.

And I’ll even make it easier for you…
Have you ever known or can show a team that lost three all stars in a single season that drew more fans as a result?
If not is it reasonable to assume Attendance is going to go up next season?

And guess what…Attendance dropped even further in 2011 by 200,000!

Now watch the affect of Buying stars on Attendance…

2005 Attendance jumped from 2.1 Mil to 2.3 Mil because of Martinez and Beltran
2006 Jumps up again to 2.8 Mil Delgado, Glavine, Hernandez, Wagner and Alou
2007 Jumped even higher to 3.3 Mil Castillo (who was still thought to be good at the time)
2008 Went as high as 4 Mil F-Rod, Santana
2009 Dropped to 3.1 Mil I wonder why? No Delgado, No Beltran, No Reyes No Significant Signings to help that fact Lots of injuries early to stop late season day of game sales!
2010 dropped yet again to 2.5 Mil Jason Bay only significant signing! No Beltran to start, Only stars on the team were Santana, Reyes K-Rod and Wright.
2011 Droped 200+K, No Santana, A question mark in Beltran, Pelfrey as your Ace Wow very hopeful season to invest in right?

Well 2012 is here and there will be no Reyes No Beltran, No K-Rod and a Santana who may not be Santana!
It is CLEAR from the numbers above that going out and getting stars brings more people to the stadium. Wins more games too so the day of game sales stay high! When they get hurt early or lose those day of game sales can cost you a little under a Mil in attendance but the season ticket sales bought before those things happened still carry the day and the payroll!
It’s no fluke that when we stopped going after good players via trade and free agency the fanbase merely said I’ll pass on season tickets and other passed on day of game sales.

Your assertion that winning leads to more attendance is true only in regards to day of game sales and season tickets for the following year!

Season Tickets are largely sold on the hopes and confidence of the team as it is built or will be built at the start of the regular season!

Getting into the Playoffs didn’t get us to 4 Mil in attendance did it? Got us close but no cigar!
it was the acquisition of Santana and F-Rod that gave the fans hope they would not choke again! And they bought tickets for 2008 based on that hope!

And the loss of Beltran, Delgado and the slump of castillo the year before, The fact our rotation was all Johan Santana who was the only SP with an ERA below 4 There was no hope that they were going to win anything and they lost 800k of attendance because of that!

And it has been going down ever since, Not BECAUSE we had Reyes and Wright, They were helping to draw the 2.3 we did in 2004 and never went below! Note we are now back to the attendance levels of just before we signed Beltran and Martinez!

And it will go down further now that Reyes Beltran and anyone good we had to give the fans seasonal hope is gone!

You can argue all you want we will talk about it at the end of the year when attendance is lower and you need to explain how!

2) No, you cry about it a lot. And you cozy up to Bayonne to talk about other people. And then you have the nerve to tell someone else to do something about it. But keep repeating the lies. Maybe you will be able to fool yourself, at least. Because that is all you’ll get.

2) actually no. When do you see me going after your “buddies” when they make snarky comments all the time at other posters who disagree with them? I don’t. However, if someone keeps going after me personally with snarky comments(like you did, not too long ago), I’m not going to sit back and take it – That was my point, and you misunderstood…again.

Also I said both sides were equally as bad – which was my point.

2) oh, so you’re being a hypocrite…again. Tom should call out “his side” but when your buddies are making threats and personal attacks, you have nothing to do with that.

So, no, you aren’t above it or better.

“. ”But I don’t see a fit for us. For me to give up chips to get a player for the rest of this year who duplicates — when healthy — one of our strengths, it really doesn’t make sense to do anything like that.””

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/16/sports/baseball-mets-weigh-joining-the-chase-for-piazza.html

1,784,017

Which would only put them higher than 2011 Baltimore, KC, Florida, Tampa, and Oakland.

Why wasn’t anybody concerned about attendance drop from 2009 to 2010? Mets lost over half a million turnstiles in 2010…. I believe Reyes was on that team right?