Home runs and attendance
There are numerous places that do a much (read: MUCH) better job reviewing and discussing various research that is published daily than I ever could (like, for instance, The Book Blog, Baseball Think Factory, Sabermetric Research, etc.). With that said, I figured since the main idea of this site is to link to other research, I may as well (on occasion) keep up with some of the recent stuff here on the blog. Remember, while the rest of this site is generally void from my opinion (thankfully for you), the blog will not be. That’s not to imply that my opinion is important — it definitely isn’t.
And yes, in a technical sense, everything linked here is a product of my opinion — but you now what I mean.
Anyway, with that out of the way, David Gassko looks at home runs and attendance over at HBT. He finds that since 1970 both home runs and attendance have gone up (correlation coefficient = .39). Of course, he also correctly notes that correlation does not imply causation. The relationship between attendance and home runs could be mostly coincidental. Take, for instance, the fact that hit by pitch has gradually gone up since 1970. Let’s hypothetically say the correlation coefficient between attendance and HBP is .70. Surely, that’s a pretty good relationship, but it’s most likely not important (i.e., probably coincidental).
So, Gassko goes on to figure that the issue needs to be looked at from a team by team level. Furthermore, you have to account for different variables that may cloud the results - like winning teams (often times teams that hit many homers) drawing high attendance figures because of the … wins (and, thus, not necessarily because of the home runs). He finds that a home run adds an extra ~2,000 fans and that it’s significant at the .001 level.
The implications are interesting. If two players are essentially equal value-wise, you’d probably want to take the one with more home runs because of the possibility of increased attendance. However, if you’re going to look beyond actual value on the field, I think you then have to consider other things like fan appeal, community involvement, and things of that nature (which I’m sure teams often times do consider). Still, since we already know that extra home runs add to attendance, it is particularly valuable. “Fan appeal” is nice, but it may not actually lead to more fans attending ball games (or more profit). I suppose, that’s for another study.