Today I want to look at regular season MLB attendance and see if there has been any statistically significant changes in attendance from 2005 to 2015. I think this is a fairly stable time period in MLB, with no changes in team locations. So what has happened to regular season attendance?
In order to answer that question, I am going to look at average regular season home attendance for each team and compare it to average regular season home attendance for each team in the prior season. I grabbed the data from ESPN. I am using average regular season attendance since teams do play slightly different number of regular season home games from one season to another. To determine if average regular season home attendance is different from one season to the next, I will use a t-test.
After calculating the t-test for each pair of seasons (i.e. 2015 average home attendance for all 30 teams to 2014 average home attendance for all 30 teams) I find that there is no statistically significant difference in any pair of seasons. In other words, statistically for each season there is no difference in league attendance since 2005. In fact, there is no statistically significant difference between average regular season attendance between the 2005 season and the 2015 season.