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Games on closing weekend tallied 1.65 million in attendance, MLB’s highest since 2008.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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Outgoing MLB Commissioner Bud Selig hasn’t given up on his dream of surpassing 80 million in annual turnout, despite another relatively flat season at the turnstiles.
The league ended the regular season with an attendance of 73.74 million, down 0.4 percent from 2013, and a second straight annual decline. But even as MLB has spent the last half decade in a tight band between 73 million and 75 million in annual attendance, Selig insists accelerating ticket sales growth can still happen for the sport.
“I absolutely think 80 million is still doable. I haven’t given up on that at all,” said Selig, who is retiring at the conclusion of his contract in January. “We were almost there before the recession [of 2008-09], and when you look at what’s happening now with almost every club, the elements are there to get back to that. That all obviously will go to [Commissioner-elect] Rob [Manfred] now, but I do believe it will happen.”
After MLB posted a record 79.5 million in attendance in 2007, Selig set a public goal of surpassing 80 million the following season. The beginnings of the Great Recession in 2008 cut into that aspiration, dropping the total to 78.6 million. Since then, MLB has been unable to reach 75 million in annual attendance, even with the creation of a second wild-card playoff spot and strong on-field competitive balance.
The Los Angeles Dodgers led the majors in attendance this year for a second consecutive year with a total of 3.78 million. The Cleveland Indians, despite a playoff berth last year and a contending team this season, ranked last with 1.44 million. The Seattle Mariners posted the largest increase, growing by more than 17 percent to 2.06 million.
Selig declined to mention the Philadelphia Phillies and Texas Rangers specifically, but those two clubs posted the largest decreases. The Phillies and Rangers, each of which finished in last place after recent runs of contention, combined to draw more than 1 million fewer fans than they did in 2013.
“Other than a couple of clubs being way down, we would have been up this year, and we’re still talking about really high numbers [historically],” he said.
Much like the last several years, MLB has moved away from a traditional bell curve-shaped attendance pattern with soft crowds in the beginning and end of the season and peak numbers during the summer. Instead, the sport posted another strong September, with the Sept. 26-28 weekend in particular registering as the season’s second-highest weekend at 1.65 million, and the largest final regular-season weekend since 2008.
MLB attendance is a vital indicator in the health of the league, and the sports industry at large. Ticket sales traditionally have represented baseball’s largest individual revenue source, though that is beginning to change somewhat amid new large-scale national and regional TV contracts, and baseball has by far more ticket inventory to sell than any other league.
Even in retirement, Selig said he plans to continue scouring attendance figures.
“Absolutely, I’ll still be doing that daily. No doubt. I’ve been doing it since 1970,” Selig said, referring to when he acquired the Seattle Pilots and moved them to Milwaukee to become the Brewers. “It’s just too much in my blood.”
