Rivalries have always played a huge role in sports, and we all know the fun in rooting against a team we hate.
In the past, rivals have been compared in a number of ways, from who has the best current team to who has won the most championships to who has the best fans.
We at SeatGeek thought it would be interesting to compare rivals based on transactions on the secondary ticket market, which we have found to be a great judge of fan sentiment .
Three weeks ago, we looked at the Mets-Phillies rivalry . Today, we will be looking at the rivalry between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers .
The first graph shows the average transaction price per month for February through July. The ticket price data is based on the date transacted, not which game the tickets are for, meaning that if a ticket is bought in February for a game in July, the data is part of February’s average.
- Average Giants ticket prices are greater than or equal to Dodgers ticket prices every month.
- July is a very interesting month for the Dodgers. We are not completely sure what was the cause of such an extreme drop. During July, the Dodgers are 6-8 and are currently 5.5 games out of first place, which might have caused fan sentiment to fall and with that, ticket prices.
- Though this data is based on the transaction date and not the game date, about 40 percent of secondary market tickets for a game are usually bought with a week of the event, and over half are usually bought within two weeks. The fact that our data for July only includes data through July 19th, and so far this month the only teams the Dodgers have played at home are the Cubs and the Marlins (two below .500 teams), could also explain the significant drop in average ticket price.
- Please comment below with any other ideas you might have regarding the significant drop in Dodgers ticket prices in July.
We also thought it would be interesting to track the ticket price changes as a percentage change over time—with February as our base month.
This allows us to compare consumer sentiment fluctuations across different teams on the same scale. For a more simple example, lets look at two teams: Team A and Team B.
In February, Team A’s tickets are $5, and Team B’s tickets are $30. In June Team A’s tickets are $10, and Team B’s tickets are $20. That means Team A experienced a 100 percent increase in ticket prices, and Team B experienced a 33.3 percent decrease in ticket prices.
Therefore:
- Giants tickets purchased in July are 19 percent below the price of tickets transacted in February.
- Dodgers tickets purchased in July are 49 percent below the price of tickets transacted in February.
- Up until July, Giants and Dodgers tickets follow an remarkably similar pattern. Prior to July, both teams’ changes in average ticket prices tracked within a 5 percent range of each other.
We will keep you updated. We plan on updating these plots monthly in addition to looking at other rivalries. Stay tuned.
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