La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

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Leones
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La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#1 Post by Leones »

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Welcome to La Peña! This is the new official blog and forum for the discussion of Havana baseball. The club would like to encourage posts here alongside our official blogs as the season progresses.

We envision this as PEBA's digital version of Havana's famous La Peña de Parque Central. A peña is a loose association of usually men who meet for a specific purpose on a regular basis. Cuba has multiple baseball peñas, typically on street corners and in parks, the one in Parque Central being one of the most famous.

Hasta luego amigos! ;-D
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#2 Post by Denny »

Cool logo! :clap:
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Leones sign

#3 Post by Leones »

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From the cane fields to the Malecón smiles were a little bigger all across Cuba this morning. The Havana Leones announced they've landed native son RF Ricard Longoria this week, signing him to a 1 year deal worth $4,730,000. Described as both a "potential highlight" at every at bat and a field general, the hard hitting lefty was exactly the sort of player the club desperately needed.

A three time All Star and Royal Raker was very happy with the signing and tweeted, "Delighted to be coming home to play for my hometown!"

Team ownership released a brief statement, "We've been looking to sign an All Star caliber player to our roster. We're delighted to announce the signing of one of Havana's very own, Ricardo Longoria. His leadership and skill will make everyone on the roster a better player."

Longoria is hugely popular in Havana. Fans have been lined up at the club store to order jerseys with his #59 on the them. Local auto shops report a rash of 59 Chevy Impalas coming in to be repainted in the team colors of "Malecón Maroon" and gold.
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#4 Post by roncollins »

Nice deal. Good for all of baseball. :)
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#5 Post by Leones »

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SABR rattling in Havana

21 Mar, 2022
Ernesto de la Torriente, La Bola Rápida

“Cigar?” Offered the leader. Appearing strangely at home, wearing his military ball cap and simple fatigues while seated in the luxurious leather chair.

“Yes please. Thank you El Indio.”

“Fine fine. Gentlemen, welcome to our little club. We are the Sociedad de American Baseball Revolucionarios. Before we decide how to proceed with our campaign, Miguel has some answers to our questions about ticket prices. As you all know this is the first season in which PEBA has offered season tickets. Additionally the Reds (Havana Leones) have increased their ticket prices after embarrassing the Cuban nation last season”

From the smoke filled room murmurs of derision arose. Epithets were hurled. Some narrowly missed other attendees and a few stuck to the darkened walls and leered down on the room like gargoyles, their acrid presence mingling with the smoke of cigars.

“I share your disgust amigos.” The leader growled after a long draw on his cigar. The flaring orange ember at the end reflecting the menace in his eyes as he continued. “Miguel, please chard your findings…”

Attention turned to to the young law student as he approached the chalkboard. “ We began by estimating the 2021 ticket prices by comparing the attendance and gate revenues from the public records. We understand that these are a crude estimate but they’re reasonable for our purposes.”

Wagging beards and grunts of agreement signaled the approval of the gathering.

Miguel continued took a chart out of his messenger bag. “Here are our ticket price estimates:”

http://pebabaseball.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/peba_tix.png

“Why are the circles different sizes?” came a voice from the back.

“The size of the circle represents the number of wins that team has last season. As you can see Havana has a very small circle, The Evas’ and Featherheads’ are much bigger.”

The room grew quiet as they took in the information. One was heard to blurt “$36 to see the Knights? Wow!” Another opined,
“Yuma looks like a relative bargain… hmm.. What is the relation of wins to attendance? Does ticket pricing have any relation to attendance?”

Miguel rummaged through his messenger bag and produced another chart. “In order to evaluate this we needed to account for the fact that stadiums have different seating capacities. So we multiplied the number of seats time 82 home games to produce a maximum amount of seats available we then compared this to the public attendance numbers to create a ‘stadium utilization’.”

The room grew very quiet. Brows furrowed as if the meeting of eyebrows could somehow make it easier to understand.
Miguel spoke to fill the void, “So if you only filled half your available seats for your home games you’d have a 50% stadium utilization, or as we label it ‘0.5’. Some teams have a stadium utilization of over 1 because we haven’t taken the time to remove playoff attendances from the numbers. It’s a small error and doesn’t affect our results significantly.”

Furrows gave way to silent ‘aaahs’ and smiles.

“Here you can see these values. The number is the utilization and the circle size also reflects this.”

http://pebabaseball.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/peba_stadut.png

The voice from the back of the room again, “Hah! I knew Tempe was too much. I see they had a low stadium utilization. And I see the Bulldozers were very popular with the people. The Leones did ok but there seems to be room for improvement.”

“Perhaps. Here is the overall result. We’ve mapped stadium utilization (stadut) to ticket prices (tix). The shapes show what position each team finished in it’s division. The color maps to games behind the division leader. The number next to the team abbreviation is the number of wins. The blue line and gray area represent the range of ‘normal’ values. As a rule of thumb to maximize your gate revenues, you want to be as high and right as possible, like Crystal Lake, Florida, Shin Seiki and London.”

http://pebabaseball.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/peba_tix_factors.png

“We can see that division winning teams (circles) filled their stadiums as expected These teams also get a bump due to playoff attendance. The rest is a bit of a muddle but there are some interesting points. Please understand we have no measure of fan support in terms of loyalty, interest and market size.”

“Dayton, Neo Tokyo and San Antonio who set the lowest ticket prices, were rewarded by full stadiums.”
“As tickets prices go over $33.50 we expect a marked drop off in attendance. Fargo, Marseille, West Virginia and Tempe could probably have had higher attendance for a modest price drop in ticket cost. There is a lesser and opposite effect for tickets under $22.”

“For our interests we see that Havana is on the fringes. It doesn’t appear that lowering ticket prices would be the most effective way to increase the gate, though we do recommend a decrease for the 2022 season. Being very far behind the division leader hurt us. We simply need to win more games. There is no substitute for victory.”

The leader broke in, “Which brings us back to the purpose of our meeting. Thank you amigo. Barbudos! I do not need these charts to know what my heart feels. We must take action if the club does not improve. Chaco! Have you talked to the printer?”
“Yes El Indio. The pamphlets are ready and we have started handing them out at the spring training games. The people find truth in our message.”

“Excellent. Umberto, what about ‘the special shipment’ ?”

“Indio, our man in Miami assures us the shipment can be delivered within 24 hours in any weather. He awaits our signal.”
“Very good, don’t signal him yet. Let’s give the club some time. I will arrange to speak with the owner before we meet again.”
Patrick Hildreth
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#6 Post by roncollins »

Very nice work. Interesting analysis, of course. Especially with ticket prices being set for the year now.

Utilization is a very interesting thing to look at, but I suggest that the size of one's ballpark is an equally fascinating element to look at. And, regarding the Tempe quote...they are a very interesting team in that they are operating under one of the more unique financial structures in the PEBAverse today. :)
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#7 Post by Lions »

Good article. I suspect there's a sweet spot between filling the stands with lower ticket prices and getting more revenue but fewer fans at higher ticket prices. To me, the ticket prices and the attendance numbers are just a means to the end... which is maximizing revenue.
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#8 Post by roncollins »

And, here's an interesting chart that suggests a big(ger) influence on revenue.
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#9 Post by roncollins »

Code: Select all

Seats	#Tms	Avg. Rev.
35000	7	$112,860,970
40000	5	$124,347,656
43000	1	$110,375,513
45000	7	$135,289,261
46000	1	$127,957,151
47400	1	$152,537,987
47500	1	$127,189,389
48000	2	$181,335,220
49000	1	$154,274,232
50000	4	$186,968,022
54500	1	$207,007,914
55000	1	$202,333,173
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#10 Post by Simon »

Nice article ;-D

I know my ticket price was too low, but it was the part of the "fan interest experiment" (which failed) :)
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#11 Post by Leones »

You guys bring up some interesting points. Some other things I want to look at is to see if there is a relationship between attendance and other revenues like merchandising and media revenues.

I was surprised to see that there didn't appear to be a strong correlation between ticket prices and attendance in between the fringes. Could be a better/deeper analysis is needed. I did try taking the division winners out of the mix. That didn't really change the curve that much. Interestingly it actually produced a small bump in the $28-$33 range.

I did try a plot to compare all the variables against each other (below) but there weren't any strong correlations I could see outside of the obvious stuff ( like wins to games behind ) [In the plots things that correlate strongly should approach a straight line]
PEBA_plot.png
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#12 Post by Lions »

That looks like modern art!
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#13 Post by Denny »

Interesting article. The one addition I would note is that from what I've observed in the past, attendance doesn't seem much affected by a lousy record until after Memorial Day....but perhaps it takes that long for a team to fall far enough out of contention.

But the main reason for my post is that I think we have all overlooked the most intriguing lines in the entire article:
Leones wrote:“Excellent. Umberto, what about ‘the special shipment’ ?”

“Indio, our man in Miami assures us the shipment can be delivered within 24 hours in any weather. He awaits our signal.”
8-o What could those wily revolutionaries have up their sleeves!? :-?
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#14 Post by Vic »

Lions wrote:Good article. I suspect there's a sweet spot between filling the stands with lower ticket prices and getting more revenue but fewer fans at higher ticket prices.
Yeah, my fuzzy memory says its a business stat term (I learned about it 15 years ago in college) ...cost differential I think...but the basic idea is that if you run a movie theater and you lower your tickets by one dollar you could make more money because of the increase in the number of seats that you fill. However, there is a break even point- you may be able to fill all of your seats all of the time for only charging one dollar but, because you have a limited number of seats and shows...you may not make more money than having half of your seats filled at the 10 dollar ticket price.
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Re: La Peña - Havana's Official Blog

#15 Post by Jason »

You have to also remember that concessions and merchanidise play a role in cost differential as well. You lower ticket prices, and increase attendance but the net concession revenue exceeds the ticket decrease. Double whammy.
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