From the teams in my town, it seems they do. I live in Portland, Maine. A city that is big on supporting Boston’s major league teams. The Sea Dogs are our AA baseball team, that has been owned by the Red Sox for year’s. They have done very well, and attendance is quite good at their games. The AHL team, the Pirates, left Portland this year after suffering many years of low attendance and poor performance. They have been owned by many various teams, mostly recently the Panthers. We also have a team in the D-league, the Maine Red Claws. Their story is much closer to that of the Sea Dogs than the Pirates. They are owned by the Celtics. Is proximity to the major league fan base a big deal, or are there more important factors at play?
I live in Tucson, which was formerly home to the Sidewinders of the PCL. They were an Arizona Diamondbacks affiliate. They usually had the worst attendance in the league, despite winning the AAA championship in 2008. They were sold and moved to Reno, NV in 2009, where they seem to be doing better, attendancewise.
Seems like a team that is too close would suffer since the fans would just go to the real team.
There are certainly a lot of examples in minor league baseball of teams drawing very well when their major league parent team is geographically close by–when the minor league franchise is in the footprint of the fan base. Some examples:
Dayton Dragons, Class A, Reds
Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs (Allentown), AAA, Phillies
Brooklyn Cyclones, A-short season, Mets
Toledo Mud Hens, AAA, Tigers
But there are also plenty of teams that draw well although the MLB team is located a long way away:
Charlotte Knights, AAA, White Sox
Nashville Sounds, AAA, Oakland
Richmond Flying Squirrels, AA, Giants
Greensboro Grasshoppers, A, Marlins
And a number of teams that don’t draw all that well even though the affiliate is located nearby:
Hagerstown Suns, A, Nationals
Everett Aquasox, A-SS, Mariners
Rome Braves, A, Atlanta
Bowie BaySox, AA, Orioles
On the whole, I think it probably helps to have the geographical connection–but it isn’t necessary, and it certainly isn’t dispositive. Especially in the lower minors, where few of the players are going to make the majors and where many of those who do are going to appear in some other uniform anyway, the bigger issues affecting attendance are things like stadium quality, the atmosphere at games, ease of access, and the like. My local low-minors team draws quite well and always has, despite being a Rays affiliate; we are over a thousand miles from Tampa and there aren’t many Rays fans in the region. Doesn’t matter; people come out for other reasons.
But it doesn’t hurt to have a close geographic connection and can certainly be helpful.
Actually, you have a kind of built-in “control group” not all that far down the road from the Sea Dogs: the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, who play in Manchester. Same league, same region of the country, same basic MLB fandom (Boston).
Looking at the attendance figures for Manchester, they basically track Portland’s over the last few years–sometimes one team has a small lead, sometimes the other.
The Portland stadium has a greater capacity by about a thousand. Hard to judge the metro populations of New England cities, as they tend to run into each other, but southern Maine is certainly well populated (and very crowded, I have noticed–no shortage of people in and around Portland!).
The interesting thing is affiliation–Portland has the Red Sox, Manchester has the Blue Jays. But being affiliated with a team that no one in the state follows and that plays several hundred miles away doesn’t seem to hurt the Fisher Cats attendance vis-a-vis the Sea Dogs. So in this case at least it’s hard to conclude that the high Portland attendance has all that much to do with being a Boston affiliate. Maybe people in northern New England just like to watch baseball.
The Sacramento RiverCats were the Oakland AAA team for years and were one of the biggest minor league draws. Then the team affiliated with the Giants, and are still a huge draw. Oakland was forced to relocate their AAA affiliate to Nashville, pretty far away, I don’t know what attendance is like there.
Right. Minor league baseball is in some ways a different product than major league baseball. While there are certainly fans (like me) who follow both, paying attention to affiliations and player movements, there are also lots of people who don’t care or necessarily even know what their local teams’ organizational positions are. Some people go to minor league games and never MLB, despite having reasonable access to both; others, the reverse.
The Hudson Valley Renegades of the NY-Penn league seem to do well. They are third in the league in attendance and have had an affiliation with the Tampa Bay Rays since 1996, some 1200 miles away. I guess with the two New York major league teams 70 miles away to build interest in baseball but too far to drive on a weeknight, they can promote a fun evening at the ballpark watching a game and other things instead of being stuck in front of the boob tube.
The arrangement in Illinois is that Quad Cities and Peoria are both in the Cardinals-Cubs rivalry area. The franchises seem to swap leagues and affiliations at random. I personally have seen Quad Cities teams as both Cardinals and Cubs affiliates (and currently they’re affiliated with the Astros.) Peoria shifted from a Cardinals affiliate to the Cubs, then back to Cardinals in 2012.
How do the Staten Island Yankees and Brooklyn Cyclones do in attendance?
The Cyclones draw very well, leading the NY-Penn League in attendance pretty much every year. On the other hand, their seating capacity is among the highest in the league, so they benefit quite a bit from that.
The SI Yankees, in contrast, do not draw especially well. They usually wind up somewhere in the middle of the pack, which is pretty poor when the league includes towns like Batavia, Auburn, Williamsport, and Morgantown. They have a big stadium, too, for the level. I don’t know what the story is there.
The Kane County Cougars (low A) (IL) have been afflicted with Miami, Oakland, the Cubs and now Arizona. They have always done well attendance wise. I think part of it is how the team markets itself. The Cougars don’t stress their current affiliation. Their focus is the stars of tomorrow are playing here today. Seems to work for them.
The Fort Wayne TinCaps (low A) have always done well attendance-wise. Our affiliate is the San Diego Padres, not exactly close by.
I don’t know if it’s surprising or not that low A baseball does as well as it does here with several major-league cities within reasonable driving distance. Cheap tickets and good promotions certainly help.
What about in hockey? I mentioned in my OP that Portland’s AHL Pirates were always aligned with faraway teams, and had very poor attendance.
Indeed. And, as was noted above: as a single-A team in the Chicago market, they market themselves less as an affiliate of a particular MLB team, and more as a destination for “family baseball fun”, that’s far less expensive than taking your family into the city to see a Cubs or White Sox game.
And, as you note, they’ve been extremely successful, attendance-wise, for the 20+ years that they’ve been in operation.
Hard to say with hockey. This year, the AHL had a massive relocation as the West Coast NHL teams all moved their AHL teams out west en masse. This was done not for attendance reasons, but to make call-ups easier. Some cities did very well with the move (Anaheim-San Diego, LA-Ontario)and some did poorly (San Jose-San Jose, Calgary-Stockton), but a lot can be attributed to novelty and playing in much bigger cities with bigger arenas. Some of the bottom attendance AHL teams like Binghamton and Utica play in cities
The AHL was until relatively recently a Northeast/New England based league, later expanding into the Midwest, so there were a lot of teams that didn’t have a local affiliate. Until a few years ago, there were 7 AHL teams in New England, but only one could affiliate with the Bruins (the Providence Bruins, who draw very well). NHL teams also used to play musical chairs with their affiliates, changing every few years. Now it’s more common for an NHL team to own their own farm team. A lot of the “traditional” AHL markets are/were in mid-sized industrial cities like Worcester, Springfield, Binghamton, Utica, etc that have seen better days and have arenas that seat less than 5,000.
2016 AHL attendance here. Hershey is, as usual, top dog. Their affiliate is Washington, but they have been a top minor league hockey draw long before the Capitals even existed, being founded in 1938. (Charlotte, Milwaukee, Rochester, and Springfield are all AHL teams older than their NHL affilitiates). However, eight of the next ten teams are in areas where their NHL team has a footprint, with two (Toronto Marlies, Manitoba Moose) actually being in the same city. However, most of these cities can be said to draw well because they are much larger cities (San Diego, Cleveland, Winnipeg, Milwaukee, Toronto) than most minor league towns.
I spent several years living in Columbus, OH. The Clippers, a farm team for the Yankees was there. They were pretty popular locally. Well, I thought Columbus had an inferiority complex anyway; no NFL, NBA, or MLB team any of which they desperately wanted. But they did have OSU football and basketball. Now they have a pro soccer team too and they’ve occasionally had hockey teams.
:: shrug :: I’ve never been much of a sports fan anyway.
This is a really interesting question. It seems like an easy experiment to me:
-
Find AAA or AA affiliates that have either changed affiliation to go from being very far from their parent team to very close, or vice versa.
-
See if the attendance changed.
-
Consider that change against the team’s success on the field (e.g. don’t be fooled by a surge in attendance that follows a championship.)
I don’t have time to do a full study, but… Locally, the Buffalo Bisons switched affiliation to the Toronto Blue Jays in 2013; the team’s attendance immediately increased slightly, but it is worth noting their attendance fell significantly after the 2008 fiscal crisis, so how much of the increase is because Canadian fans cross the border to see the team and how much is just natural recovery? In any case the uptick has been minor. The team’s attendance really has stayed the same for a long time.
An interesting case is Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, which saw a huge uptick in attendance when switching from the Phillies to the Yankees in 2007. Scranton is more or less the same distance from both Philadelphia and New York, so one would have to think branding had something to do with that.
As others have noted, AAA teams are sort of selling their own product, and have been known to get surly and change affiliation if they feel the parent club is not providing them with winning ballplayers; I suspect winning is what draws fans, not affiliation. I’ve been to AAA games and the reliance on the parent club brand is almost nonexistent from what I have seen; when you attend a Toledo Mud Hens game, you are attending a Toledo Mud Hens game, not a “look at all the Tiger farmhands” game. There is very little mention of the Tigers. I am quite honestly of the opinion the Mud Hens, who are only an hour from Detroit, would draw just as well, all other things being equal, if they were an affiliate of the San Diego Padres.
That’s interesting - there are a couple of different models of minor league teams. The Mud Hens have a strong brand of their own, as do (my hometown AAA team) the Bisons. The RailRiders are an interesting case - they previously used the Yankee branding but changed over to their own team name a few years back. It might be interesting to take a look at persistent attendance effects following that switch.
The other end of things would be the Brooklyn Cyclones, which brand heavily as a Mets team (right down to their merchandise featuring Michael Conforto as of July, with the slogan “Amazin’ Starts Here”). The Binghamton Mets, on the other hand, are changing their branding to a local name to be determined. I’m curious - is it becoming more common for minor league teams to develop their own brand?
It is more and more common. When my area got a New York-Penn League team 20 years ago or so, well over half of the 14 teams in the league used the parent club nickname: the Oneonta Yankees, the Vermont Expos, the New Jersey Cardinals, the Welland Pirates, the St. Catherines Blue Jays, and a few others I’m blanking on.
Today, just two teams use the parent nickname: the Connecticut Tigers and the Staten Island Yankees, who will be rebranding with a different name after the season is over.
The Cyclones, obviously, focus heavily on the Mets despite having a name all their own, but they are an exception. As has been pointed out, it’s often very difficult to tell who the parent club is these days simply by attending the minor league affiliate’s games. They’re not relying on the cachet of the major league team to draw fans.