Maybe Size Matters

One of the reasons touted by MLB that the game needs rescuing are the flat attendance figures.  In 2007, MLB reached a high in its history of 79.5 million fans attending games that year.  That number slid into the mid 70 million level and further dipped below 70 million since 2018.  Of course the Covid pandemic affected the game heavily in 2020 (no fans) and 2021 (limited fans), with the game climbing back to just under 65 million last year.  Even though baseball was fully open for business in 2022 there were likely a portion of fans who still stayed away for fears of infection.  Likely, with or without rule changes the numbers will climb further in 2023, but it is too early to predict where the total will be by season end.  If it goes up though, we guarantee that MLB and the media will give all the credit to pitch clocks and speeding up the game with rule changes, but that is a discussion for another post.

MLB Attendance Figures 2000 – 2022

Major League Miscellaneous Year-by-Year Averages and Totals | Baseball-Reference.com

As noted in our prior post (see below), we noted there are a myriad of reasons for why overall attendance figures declined somewhat from that peak in 2007.  MLB though decided though that the sole issue was the slow pace of games and implemented rule changes as the way to solve the game’s supposed ills.  In that post, we noted several reasons why attendance figures declined, but today we will focus on only one of those reasons.

Baseball Purist – Opening Day and Shorter Games

Simply put the size of ballparks has decreased over the past two decades.  Per the table below, 16 new stadiums opened since 2000, with the seating capacity decreasing for 15 of those 16 new ballparks.  Therefore, over the past 20 plus years there are 185,717 fewer seats each day to watch a major league game.  This is not the sole reason for the decline in attendance, but certainly, a factor that MLB nor the media will ever bring up to explain the drop in fans.

New vs Old MLB Stadiums Opened Since 2000

If the stadium capacity decreased that means the supply of tickets declined, which can only mean that teams had only one way to recoup their prior revenue, which was through higher ticket prices.  In addition, with a new stadium, many of these teams do take on additional loans to fund these new parks, which puts pressure on clubs to increase revenues even further.  Therefore, couldn’t both the smaller capacity parks along with increased ticket prices (even above the cost of inflation) dampen the average fans interest in attending games or at least scaling back their visits to games.  The answer seems obvious.  In future posts we will look at just how much those costs have soared for the average fan.