The Twins last week introduced a special $5 ticket offer, and on Friday about 1,000 of those tickets were "used in the upper decks in left and right field," which helped produce the team's largest crowd since Opening Day with an announced attendance of 26,739, according to Patrick Reusse of the Minneapolis STAR TRIBUNE. Twins President David St. Peter said, "A big incentive was to get some people in the ballpark for this weekend. We had a team starting a homestand that’s playing very well, and we were hoping to get fans who hadn’t been here for a while to take a look. ... Our TV ratings are up 30 percent; we know that baseball fans are still out there." The team's official attendance for '18 was 1,959,197, the lowest in Target Field's history. St. Peter: "The projections when we moved in here were that attendance might level off at 2.4 or 2.5 million at some point in this first decade. We did not see tickets sold falling under 2 million." He added, "You can talk weather, you can talk competition in this market, you can talk baseball attendance in general, but for us, it has been the product." Reusse noted season tickets "fell another 2,000 this season to roughly 11,000." Looking at that number, the Twins in early March "offered a dramatic discount package." However, St. Peter said the discount did not work "nearly as well as we hoped," which led the team to offer the special $5 ticket (Minneapolis STAR TRIBUNE, 5/11).
AHEAD OF THE GAME: ESPN's Jeff Passan said of the Twins' $5 ticket offer, "When you get somebody into a baseball stadium, when you have them in the atmosphere there and enjoying all of the things that you get at a big-league ballpark, that changes their perspective on the game, that changes their experience." Passan said there are "so many issues about the prices to go to a game" for fans that if you "invite them back and say, 'We want you here, we want to show you that baseball games are worth going to,' you're going to get people back in the seats." ESPN Radio's Trey Wingo said this was a "really proactive" decision by the Twins and it is "certainly working" ("Golic & Wingo," ESPN Radio, 5/10).
