Picks and pans from a Shorebird fan – 2011 edition

You know, it’s funny. Due to a number of factors, I didn’t get to nearly the number of Shorebirds games I had the previous few seasons but I think I have a better understanding of how things are because, one, I could step back a bit and see things from without, and, two, I had some long and interesting talks with Shorebirds management regarding suggestions I’d made in previous years.

And in all honesty, the problem may run deeper than a few cosmetic changes. Let’s look at some numbers for comparison’s sake – I actually found numbers for the entire 16-year history of the club but for simplicity I’ll just put up years 1, 6, 11, and 16.

  • Year 1 (1996): 315,011 – 4,846 per game
  • Year 6 (2001): 268,143 – 3,886 per game
  • Year 11 (2006): 217,980 – 3,406 per game
  • Year 16 (2011): 211,993 – 3,072 per game

In both actual attendance and average (not to mention on-field performance) this year was the worst in Shorebirds history. Having said that, though, the Shorebirds still ranked sixth in the league in average attendance and once again was tops among the three 7th Inning Stretch (the LLC which owns the Shorebirds and two other minor league clubs) teams in both average and actual attendance. This is the fifth season the Shorebirds have been owned by the group but the eighth straight year attendance has settled into a narrow range between this year’s low and the 2008 peak of 226,754. That edition happens to be the last team which was good on the field, as they compiled a 78-61 record that summer.

With that in mind, I think I can make an assumption that having a good team would improve attendance perhaps 10 percent. It’s probably not in the cards that we’ll see another attendance record like 1997’s 324,412 (the all-time record here) unless the overall economy improves and the area begins to grow again. True, we won the SAL title in 1997 but we did so again three seasons later and attendance wasn’t markedly better than the previous two campaigns.

Continue reading “Picks and pans from a Shorebird fan – 2011 edition”

A new feature

A few weeks back I was contacted by an internet entrepreneur who wanted me to try his product. This happens from time to time, but his request was for an interesting reason.

It seems that the creator of SendLove.to had too many liberal websites already signed up and it was skewing his results. Somehow or other he got wind of this site and that it was conservative, and he asked me to install his plugin in order to balance things out.

So I thought, what have I got to lose and I installed it last night. (It was pretty easy, even for me – I’m not really all that much of a WordPress maven.) If you were reading the last dossier I put up and came to it from the Facebook page (thus, going directly to the article instead of through my main page) you may have noticed first that certain names are pretty in pink. In addition there are tabs on the bottom where the comments are with the names Mitt Romney, Nancy Pelosi, Al Sharpton, and others.  You would see the three I mentioned again (and again in pink) if you saw this page as an individual page because SendLove scans a post’s content for certain keywords and highlights them to solicit your opinion on the person. You can simply vote them up or down, or add a comment.

I can see a couple minor bugs in it – for example, it wouldn’t let me get back to a couple of the tabs once I pulled another down – but even just the little bit I played with it was interesting. I can even bring up past articles and it will bring up any name they have in the system, so I just dinged Ben Cardin quite nicely. (Since I brought him into this post now you can too.) And it doesn’t work from the main page, although I’m told they’re working on this. Since a good portion of my traffic comes directly to a post from Facebook, Twitter, or a search engine this isn’t such a bad omission.

Obviously I talk about national issues and political figures quite a bit, so I would imagine regular readers have an opportunity to weigh in a lot about particular people and follow the discussion from post to post (these are not wedded to one post like a normal comment.) I noticed Nancy Pelosi has a high national rating, for example, so my readers are going to have to take care of that.

As I figured would happen after Labor Day passed my readership is back on the upswing. So give this new feature a try and let me know how you like it.