■ TEAMS (FIRST SEASON): International League Toledo Mud Hens (1965), ECHL Toledo Walleye (2009)
■ VENUES (YEAR OPENED): Fifth Third Field (2002), Huntington Center (2009)
The two teams in the market that ranked No. 1 in our study in 2013 drew more than 842,000 fans combined in their most recently completed seasons, a record sum, despite the area’s population decline. The total was driven by the ECHL Walleye, whose postseason run to a league championship added 65,000 fans to their attendance count. The 6-year-old ECHL franchise drew 296,739 fans for its 2014-15 season (including playoffs), the most for a hockey franchise in a market that has hosted professional hockey almost continuously since 1947. That strength helped make up for the fact that, on the baseball side in Toledo, the Mud Hens’ 2014 attendance (545,265) was the team’s lowest in a decade and 4 percent below its average season total since Fifth Third Field opened in 2002. Still, fans filled more than 76 percent of the ballpark’s seats over the past five seasons, a rate higher than that of any other baseball team in the survey’s top 10.
The Mud Hens also appeared on Minor League Baseball’s annual list of top-selling merchandise during all five of the seasons measured for this year’s study, extending that streak to 18 consecutive seasons, the longest of any baseball club in the top 10.
Those trends have occurred in a market that has seen a 14 percent increase in its amount of total personal income from 2010 to 2014, but its population has dropped 0.4 percent over that time and is down 10 percent from the early 1970s.
