Last night was a brutal one for attendance in the majors. Three parks - Nationals Park, Rogers Center and Safeco Field - all set record lows for the venues, combining for a collective crowd of less than 37,000. Add on the Camden Yards low set on the same night last week, and Bud Selig can be forgiven for adding I Don't Like Mondays to his iPod playlist.
↵Overall, numbers are only fractionally down on a per-game basis. 334 less, to be precise, barely one percent, compared to the same period in 2009. However, the drop would be a great deal more if it weren't for the surge created by Target Field, where the Twins are pulling in almost 14,000 a night more than they were in the Metrodome.
↵If that number is taken out of the calculations, the drop for the other 29 times is already almost 150,000 fans, barely two weeks into the season. Even if the Twins continue to bolster the numbers at the current rate, by the end of the year, baseball is looking at about a loss of 700,000 fans on the year, with attendance dropping to its lowest-level since 2003.
↵Winners and losers so far
↵- ↵
- Twins: +13,977 per game ↵
- Braves, +7,407 ↵
- Rangers, +5,949
----------------------------------- ↵ - Diamondbacks, -5,029 ↵
- Marlins, -5,221 ↵
- A's, -6,412 ↵