The Pecan Park Eagle

It’s 2015. The Astros have on of the best records in baseball. The 2014 AL batting champion is swinging away. – What’s missing in this picture?

Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative

How is it possible that the Houston Astros could be playing so well and yet still drawing game crowds so poorly?

Yes, we understand. From a marketing standpoint, there are some  problems that the club may never acknowledge or own publicly – nor do we expect President Reid Ryan to do so. When your club has the biggest divisional lead and one of the best records in baseball after June 1st, it’s probably no time to say anything that could be interpreted by the media wags as either negative or an internal lack of confidence in the team and, in total candor, this whole, so-far, successful rebuilding process.

As a result, the public face of the Astros may be to publicly celebrate the 21,000 fans who show up to watch a weekend game against another contender, and to pass on addressing the 21,000 seats that remained empty.

Maybe not. But who could blame them, if they did. It’s human to hope that accentuating the positive will drive the negative away and sometimes it does. At others, as the case may be here, the negative will only go away once we accurately identify the problem(s) and explore what we may be able to do about them. And then, once our objectives for change are decided, we commit to doing  those things in some calculated, totally relentless form as an organizational strategy.

What’s this column all about?

So, why does The Pecan Park Eagle think that the wonderful (thanks largely to faith in GM Greg Luhnow) 2015 Houston Astros club seem to be struggling in their campaign to use winning as the card that recaptures the big crowds?

We think the problems effecting mediocre game attendance for an exciting and young winning 2015 Astros ball club are several. Some have fairly clear answers. Others not.

We do not possess the audacity of thinking that we have all the answers about problems and solutions to the attendance issue wrapped up in a bow, nor do we presume that the Astros are not already aware of these things and working on them quietly.

We simply want to put them out here as though they are cards that need be kept in mind and somehow played to win the battle for support from a fan base that really cares about what happens to the Houston Astros.

Here are our cards and, for the sake of brevity, there will not be 52 cards in this pack. So, anyone who doesn’t like what we have to say, please feel free to fall back on the fact that we were not playing with a full deck from the start:

Card # !: Competition with Other Leisure Time and Money Diversions

Baseball is no longer our National Pastime in actuality. Competition from football, basketball, NASCAR, water sports, and other leisure time market activities have changed the landscape over the past forty years as to how Americans and, at least one Canadian city’s citizens use the disposable incomes.

Card # 2: The “Out of Sight/Out of Mind” Hangover

(a) Those two 60% cable TV blackout seasons (2013-14) in the Houston area hurt deeply, we think. They violated the first rule of marketing: “If you don’t want people to buy your product, don’t let them see it.” A number of people have told us that those two blackout seasons were the time they found “other things to do” and lost interest in returning to baseball when the ROOT network finally picked up the dropped ball in 2015.

(b) Even with ROOT, the fans in this state’s other major metro areas don’t get it. Time-Warner controls what cable fans in the Austin-San Antonio and Corpus Christi areas see. My brother lives in the Corpus Christi area. They, as is true in Austin, only get to see the Astros when they are playing that network’s “home” team, the Texas Rangers. About the same circumstance in Austin, Wayne Roberts has written us to express the following: “I still haven’t seen a game this season. Time Warner doesn’t carry Root. Once again, the Astros default the Central Texas market to the Rangers.”

My brother says that once he gets past Jose Altuve, he cannot name another single starter on the 2015 team. He admits also to not thinking about the Astros much as the time goes by.

Let’s expand this card title to include where it leads: “Out of Sight/Out of Mind/Out of Interest/ Out of My life.”

Now do the math. How many fans from the traditionally rich Astros fan bases in Corpus Christi and Austin are variably feeling the same things that John McCurdy of the Corpus Christi area and Wayne Roberts of the Austin area are now feeling.

These are the out-of-town fans, when they cared about the team, that used to fill many of those now empty seats on weekends and during summer vacations.

And what about the kids from those areas that are growing up with exclusive exposure to the Texas Rangers? If they keep their interests in baseball into adulthood, who do we expect them to go see any club? The Rangers are our guess.

The Astros brand needs to get out there statewide again through an expansion of the ROOTS sports network. Even Coca-Cola understands that they have t keep their name out there to avoid being forgotten.

Card No. 3: Sports Talk Radio in Houston

We’ve already beat this card to death at least twice in other columns. The Astros and baseball are pretty much an after thought to the mike jockeys who blab their ways through our ears in drive time about the Texans, the Rockets, and which broadcasters from their staff would have the best shot at dating actress Jessica Alba, if she weren’t already married and they were available too.

This is madness!

How about giving some serious thought to an entertaining radio talk show about baseball only?

Card No. 4: The Operant Conditioning Factor in Being a Baseball Fan

Operant conditioning is a behavioral psychological process that has its roots in the late 19th and early 20th century work of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov proved with rats that they could be taught to take a certain path in a maze over time and repetition, if they were always rewarded with cheese at the end of that route after being released into the maze each time at the same entry point.

Pavlov also discovered that if the rats were sometimes denied that cheese reward at the end of their run through the maze that they would start making mistakes about the route again. If the reward was removed totally, the rats would totally stop trying.

As much as we hate to admit it, we humans, and maybe in some particular way, we baseball humans are a lot like Pavlov’s rats on the operant behavioral level. – We are stimulated to go ball games because we enjoy the fun. There’s also cheese for us too. We get it on the nachos.

If we our team is a winner, we probably will have more fun and come even more often.

If we start running into too many inconveniences, like traffic, or parking, etc., we may not come as often, but we will still be there because we care about the Astros – and we still believe the Astros care about us.

On the more extreme side, if you take away our way home cable TV for a couple of years, or baseball goes on strike, or, because of others’ work, we can no longer follow the Astros in our outlying communities, we start thinking the cheese is gone – and start looking for it elsewhere.

Once people find another comfort zone with a pattern that meets their reward needs with something other than baseball, it may be hard to impossible getting these people back – especially, if their last thoughts upon closing the door on the Astros were, “why should I care about the Astros? They didn’t seem to care about me.”

Card No. 5: The Bud Selig American League Squeeze Play on Jim Crane and the Astros

Many longtime fans will no longer attend Astros games because of both the club’s shift to the American League in 2013 and also, because of the way they got there. My own grown son has not been to a single Astros game with me since they moved to the AL because of the way I raised him to feel about the DH. Unfortunately, at my age, I still love the team and any kind of baseball more than I once detested the DH, but I’ve sort of come around to not minding the DH so much after all. (That’s another subject for another day.)

The other big thing with many stayaways from this category is the Bud Selig Factor. Some feel that Selig simply leveraged Jim Crane during the final stages of the deal. Much the way car dealers like Selig must have done in his previous career, he knew he had his buyer on the hook and that the “deal” was the perfect place for hm to get what he wanted – a team that move to the American League to even the AL/NL team alignment at 15 teams each, with three 5-team divisions in each league. With the Astros in this vulnerable spot, Selig would not have to waste further time searching for a fully enfranchised club that could say “NO” to him.

The stayways, as do many of us still attend games because we still care about the Astros, recognize that Selig showed no concern for Houston’s long-time association with the NL, even prior to actual NL membership – and absolutely no interest in the opinions of Houston Astros fans in this matter of transferring the club to the AL.

The irony? In 1997, acting commissioner Selig talked Brewers owner Selig into moving his club from the AL to the NL for the sake of making sure that both leagues could maintain an even number of clubs in each circuit. The result was 16 teams in the NL and 14 teams in the AL. Then, in his pre-2013 move on the Astros, Commissioner Selig mad Huston leave the NL and take Milwaukee’s place n the AL so that both leagues would each have 15 teams.

Very interesting, but very damaging to the fan base that has been alienated by Selig and the way he pulled this stunt on our National League team.

Card No. 6 (and it’s no Joker): Don’t Count 100% on “They’ll get over it. All we have to do is win.”

If what we’ve tried to convey in these few thoughts isn’t clear enough as a call to action on all possible repairs to the Astros brand and statewide TV coverage, we will be wasting your time and ours writing more,

Enough said.