Major League Baseball welcomed 73,364,441 fans into stadiums this season, the fifth-highest total in the history of the game. That sounds great, until you realize that the total attendance numbers dropped 6.65 percent for the year, the steepest drop since 1952. Before you start sounding the recession alarm, however, it's important to note that there wasn't much chance of baseball avoiding a decline this season. The Mets and Yankees each moved into new, smaller ballparks this season, moves which cost baseball more than 20,000 seats in total. As Maury Brown of The Biz of Baseball points out, even if each team had sold out every seat this season there wasn't much chance of baseball not seeing a downturn in attendance. As it was, the two New York teams accounted for 30 percent of the total decline.
That's not to say the recession didn't play a role. Both the Mets and Yankees were heavily criticized for the pricing of seats at their new stadiums, and their fans spoke with their wallets by leaving both teams well short of capacity crowds all season long. The Yankees only filled their ballpark to 87.3 percent of capacity even though they finished with the best record in baseball. That left the Dodgers with the highest attendance in the league, the first time since 2002 that anyone but the Bronx Bombers topped the rolls.
Another big drop that must be blamed, in some part, on the economy was the nearly 20 percent decline experienced by the Tigers. Although major magazines credited the Tigers' surprisingly stong season with buoying the sad state of affairs in Detroit, many fans obviously couldn't afford to find their way through the turnstiles. One wonders how much worse the league's total would have been if the Tigers hadn't actually produced a good product this season.
Bad teams in Oakland, Toronto and Washington spurred big drops in turnstile clicks in each of those towns, however. The A's have shed fans since 2004, a distressing situation for a team that can't seem to find a way to get a new stadium that might boost their attendance. As it is, they've now slipped behind the Marlins into 30th place and seem destined to stay there now that the Florida club has a stadium headed its way.
With all of those factors in play, the numbers could have been a lot worse. Commissioner Bud Selig seemed to agree with that sentiment in comments to USA Today.
"Given that we are in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression," Selig said, "it is stunning. This year is a great testament to the huge popularity of our sport."Despite Selig's comments, that probably won't stop teams from using these attendance figures as a reason to suppress spending this offseason, which should make for an interesting case if the union alleges collusion after the free-agent season comes to a close.
