This year, both those concerns have largely evaporated. Others said they needed a year of steady revenues before they were able to do staff outings. The Stripers are on pace for their best attendance since 2015.Īccording to McCormick, last year some groups were still hesitant to come back to the ballpark because of the pandemic. We’re seeing that group element come back to the ballpark now,” Gwinnett Stripers general manager Erin McCormick said. While season-ticket sales and single-game tickets returned to pre-pandemic levels last year, civic groups and corporate outings remained hard to book in 2022. So what happened? In conversations with front office officials with multiple teams, groups have returned to the ballpark in 2023 in a way they didn’t in 2022. Even better for MiLB teams, it’s a 207 fan per game increase over where they were at this time last year.Īnd it’s just seven fans per game fewer than teams drew in 2019 through July 23. That’s up 124 fans per game across the minors when compared with the end-of-year totals for 2022. This year looks a whole lot more like 2019 than it does 2022.Īs of July 23, MiLB teams were averaging 4,034 fans per team per game. Now, a collective sigh of relief can be heard around the minors. If that was the new normal, it would mean that it had settled in at a level worse than what Minor League Baseball had seen in any year since the start of the 21st century. In 2022, the average team drew just 3,910 fans per game. Most years, the average team drew a little more than 4,000 fans per game. While there’s no hope that the slimmed-down minor leagues will ever again come close to that 43 million total attendance record, throughout the 2010s, the minors had found a nice equilibrium. ![]() Minor league attendance hasn’t really grown since 2007, when a record 43.26 million fans came to games, an average of 4,170 fans per game. Some expressed concern that the new sea level for minor league attendance had dipped significantly. Attendance across the minors was down 380 fans per game per team compared with 2019, the last year before the pandemic. Last year was supposed to be the return to normalcy, but when the season wrapped, teams across the minors faced a new realm of fears. When the minors returned in 2021, there were still capacity restrictions for many teams, and there was still a reluctance by some to return to games. The effects of the coronavirus pandemic didn’t end there. ![]() Right on the heels of that came the MLB-mandated scaling back of the minor leagues from 160 affiliated ticket-selling teams to 120. There were furloughs, layoffs and payroll cuts that proved to be an off-ramp for a number of longtime minor league front office employees. ![]() The last few years have been brutal ones for many who work in minor league baseball. (Photo by Ben Ludeman/Texas Rangers/Getty Images)
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