New Schedule Leads To Large Attendance Drop For CWS

First Game Of Georgia-Fresno State CWS Final Draws Crowd Of 19,559

A change in the College World Series (CWS) schedule this year that pushed back the start by one day "has produced a significant drop in attendance without improving television ratings,” according to Andy Gardiner of USA TODAY. The average attendance for the 13 sessions at Rosenblatt Stadium heading into last night’s Georgia-Fresno State Championship Series Game One was down 2,161 from 11 sessions in ’07. Also, last night's crowd of 19,559 was down from 26,887 for Oregon State-North Carolina Championship Series Game One in '07, which was played on a Sunday. The crowd for Sunday’s Fresno State-North Carolina elimination game drew 15,125, the “smallest number since 2004.” The start of the CWS was pushed back to Saturday because the NCAA “wanted to create extra time for advancing teams in case super regionals had weather delays,” and ESPN “preferred to move the start from Friday afternoon to boost ratings.” NCAA Managing Dir of Baseball & Football Dennis Poppe said that attendance “would be discussed during the NCAA’s annual review" of the event (USA TODAY, 6/24). CWS attendance in each of the last two years has been over 300,000, and officials said that it “might take the championship series advancing to a third game in order to reach that number this year.” The weather, the new schedule and the economy are "all being blamed for attendance totals that are running between 10,000 and 15,000 seats behind this year" (KETV.com, 6/23).

EMPTY FEELING: CBSSPORTS.com’s Dennis Dodd writes, “Call it the economy, the price of gas or just too much baseball, but something is missing from this year’s CWS.” A three-game championship series was added in '03, which is "fairer to the teams than a single championship game, but all this baseball has begun taxing wallets as well as attention spans.” And while the product “might look good on television, it’s starting to get on everyone’s nerves.” Dodd: "It's obvious that stretching this much baseball into this long a period has tired even the players and fans who love the game so much. The tickets might have been sold out but fans aren’t showing up to occupy all the seats” (CBSSPORTS.com, 6/24).

RACE AND THE DRAFT: The WALL STREET JOURNAL’s James Wagner notes according to the NCAA, 86% of college baseball players in the NCAA's top three divisions are white, a “big difference from [MLB], where one study puts the number at less than 60%.” The “most striking difference is in the number of Latinos on the field: They made up about 29% of all major leaguers in 2007 but only 5% of players in college.” According to MLB data, 55% of players picked in last year’s MLB Draft came from four-year schools, up from 38% in ’98. Now that college has become a “sexier pipeline for the major leagues,” players who do not attend college may be not only “passing up an education but also earning less money in the long run.” But “many forces beyond the easy cash compound” the racial discrepancy in college baseball. They include “challenges in recruiting, a college draft that, unlike the [NBA’s], doesn’t include prospects from abroad, and baseball scholarships that are fewer and less comprehensive than football and basketball scholarships” (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 6/24).