The combination of a handful of geographic rivalries and a steady rotation of fresh opponents is keeping interleague play valuable for Major League Baseball franchises, jump-starting attendance in a difficult economic climate.
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| The Giants’ trip to Oakland produced attendance gains for the A’s and buzz for both. |
Even as critics continue to carp that only a handful of bitter rivalries deliver results, the numbers say otherwise.
Fifty-seven of the 84 interleague series played last month outdrew comparable games played between teams in the same league (see chart). Twenty-four of them delivered gains of 30 percent or more. Thirty-eight of them produced double-digit increases.
Those comparisons take into account whether the games are played on weekends, when attendance across baseball rises significantly. Average attendance for interleague games was 31,034 this season, a 20 percent improvement over games played within each league.
Intraleague attendance figures include April, May and June contests, while interleague contests were played only in June.
The showcase rivalries that are played as home-and-home series each year produced the largest gains on average this season, with the teams that generally are considered as "second bananas" in their cities or regions benefiting the most.
The White Sox doubled their average weekend attendance when the Cubs came to town. For the second year in a row, the Angels set a three-game Edison International Field attendance record thanks to their Freeway Series against the Dodgers. The Giants bumped Oakland's attendance by 81 percent when they came across the bridge. The Yankees briefly rekindled fan interest at Shea.
The results made it clear that there is enough juice in those rivalries to justify continuing to devote two weekends to them each season, even if it means further tilting an already unbalanced schedule.
"At one time, if they said we could only play three vs. Oakland we would have accepted it just fine," said Larry Baer, chief operating officer of the Giants. "We would have loved to have them for three and then play everybody else in the division. But, now, the rivalry has grown to the point that it's good for us."
Baseball shifted its interleague strategy last season, abandoning the practice of having the same teams play each other every season. Rotating opponents allowed MLB to put together a schedule in which 49 of the 84 interleague series featured matchups between teams that had never met in the regular season before this year.
That didn't pay off in every case. Twenty-two of the 27 series that underperformed compared with the standard fare were between teams that were meeting for the first time. But the rotation also produced some interesting first-time combinations that were resounding hits, such as the St. Louis Cardinals' visit to Yankee Stadium, which drew the second-largest gate of all the interleague matchups, averaging 55,062 per game.
For some clubs, the impact of interleague play has become significant beyond the attendance boost. The Giants, for example, were averaging 97 percent of capacity for weekend games before the A's came in, so there wasn't much room for attendance growth.
Still, Baer said the club saw a large up-side to playing the A's twice.
"When the games are on the weekend, just in terms of pure attendance we don't benefit, because we've been selling out those games," Baer said. "But it creates a tremendous amount of buzz. That's good because it can bleed over to other games and to our television broadcasts and merchandise sales and sponsors. When you generate that additional excitement, it's a plus."
