Texas Rangers players are known for making smart choices and agile moves on the baseball diamond. And this Major League Baseball team’s front-office staff is doing the same—with data.
From analyzing ticket sales in near-real-time for optimal staffing to understanding just how all those peanuts, Cracker Jacks, and beer are impacting the bottom line—the Texas Rangers are using Tableau to be as nimble and smart in the front-office as their players are on the field.
The Texas Rangers are a Major League Baseball (MLB) team based in Arlington, Texas.
The players give their all on the field and so does the team behind the scenes. We took advantage of the off-season to visit the front office and learn more about how they use Tableau to turn data into a home run for the Texas Rangers.
Sarah Stone, Manager, Advertising & Marketing: Butts in seats—that is my main goal, to get people in the stadium, get them excited, help them support the team, and help the team get to the World Series.
Katie Morgan, Assistant Director, Ticket Operations: We were really siloed. We were all just kind of floating around with our own data but we weren’t making good decisions with that data, because we didn’t have the full 360-degree view.
Mike Bullock, VP, Information Technology: We really did use what would probably be considered a relatively dull set of tools.
Becky Kimbro, VP, Marketing: Each department kind of made their own spreadsheets. So I would take some sales data and make my own version of what I thought I wanted to see.
Katie: We have started kind of a new group. We call it the analytics task force.
Sarah: The big project that really brought us all together was saying, “Hey, let’s get ahold of this ticketing data, and let’s present it in a manner that almost anyone can interact with.”
Becky: So now that we have Tableau, all of that information is right at our fingertips.
Katie: We have a lot of data sources, which for a data nerd is really fun. It gives us a broader scope picture of who’s buying tickets from us, once they get in the ballpark are they buying merchandise, are they buying food and beverage.
Mike: We get a lot more insightful information and actionable information from visualizations than we ever could from that old, blunt, dull tool set that we had before.
Becky: With our real-time analytics, we’re able to do things like make staffing decisions on the fly.
Katie: We had a severe rain delay one day, and when we pulled that real time data up, we realized that we hadn’t sold a ticket within the last 15 minutes; we could probably shut down 75 percent of our windows, which in turn saved us additional money on staffing costs that day.
Becky: Tableau has really helped us understand how to better use the resources that we have.
Mike: I can’t hit a home run, I can’t strike someone out, but I can do my job every day and hopefully have an impact on the success of the organization.
I think in the last year we’ve hit a home run with Tableau.
