We looked recently at the current state of MLB’s baseball attendance in our post titled The Baseball Attendance Myth. Now that the regular season is in the books we thought we would take a quick look at the final numbers. Total attendance was 71,752,722 in 2026, which represents an increase of 343,200 fans from 2025.
That increase is a bit misleading, since the largest jump in attendance by one team as compared to the prior year was the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays saw an increase of 628,225 fans from the prior year. The reason for that attendance rise, was not due to some heightened interest in the game, but rather because the Rays played their home games in a tiny minor league park in 2025 caused by hurricane Milton destroying their home stadium, Tropicana Field. The minor league park where the Rays played their entire 2025 season only held 11,000 fans, resulting in a total attendance of just 786,750. Thus the move back to the much larger Tropicana Field resulted in the jump in attendance this year.
Instead of comparing apples to oranges, we decided to use the 2024 season data for the Rays to determine the adjusted change in attendance. In 2024 the Rays had just over 1.3 million fans as compared to the little more than 1.4 million in 2026. Thus the change in attendance was really around 100k for the Rays, which means major league baseball on an adjusted basis did not experience an increase of roughly 343k but rather a decrease of 185k fans, year over year.
It is difficult to say where attendance will head in the coming years. As a point of reference, MLB expanded to 30 teams in 1998 and since that time total annual attendance has fluctuated from a high of 79.5 million in 2007 to a low of 67.6 million fans in 2003. [Note that we are excluding the Covid years of 2020 (zero), 2021 (45.3 million) and 2022 (64.6 million) from our analysis for the lowest attendance years. In addition, if you want to understand the rationale for excluding 2022, see our prior post again titled The Baseball Attendance Myth.]
The BP naysayers would argue that we will never be happy with any increase and that we will simply poke holes in any jump in the post rule attendance figures. Our counter-argument is that attendance increases will never justify gutting baseball’s rules. Attendance and fan interest in the game has clearly fluctuated over time, but changing the core rules to attract at best a marginal increase of casual fans does not outweigh tarnishing the legacy of the game.
Extra Innings!!
Interestingly enough as we were writing this post, we came across a similar story about attendance on ESPN. While the title of the story states, “MLB attendance up for 4th straight year, boosted by Rays” there were other ominous signs somewhat glossed over in this piece such as:
- While 13 teams increased in attendance the other 17 showed declines.
- Five clubs topped three million in attendance, but there were six in both 2024 and 2025, while 2023 previously had eight teams with more than three million.
| ESPN’s analysis of the attendance trend is very different from ours here at Baseball Purist. Not surprisingly this is our reaction. |  |
