Thursday, April 24, 2008
Another Year, Same Old Attendance
The 2008 Pittsburgh Pirates’ campaign has begun as the team tries to make it to .500 and thus avoid tying the record of consecutive losing seasons in professional sports at sixteen years. The anemic attendance numbers at PNC Park thus far this season indicate that a lot of people might end up missing the possible tying of a record.
Through nine home games, attendance has averaged 14,337, lowest in the league and about 5 percent below the Florida Marlins, who are next to last. How far fortunes have fallen since the late 1990s when taxpayer subsidies for PNC Park were sold as a way to keep the Pirates here, make the team competitive, and boost attendance. One out of three isn’t too bad, we guess.
Here’s the problem as we noted out in our Issue Summary on attendance: aside from the opening year of the park (2001) and the boost from having the All-Star game here (2006), total attendance is not much different from where it was at Three Rivers Stadium. The taxpayers of the region were promised more than a one year boost in attendance and projections placed it closer to the 2 million level annually. More realistic numbers are in the 1.5 to 1.6 million range. PNC Park attendance has never risen higher than 17th in the league, and that happened in the park’s debut year.
Here’s the other problem: the teams languishing at the bottom of the barrel in attendance with the Pirates include Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. Two of these cities built retro ballparks that inspired the push and design for PNC Park. In the case of Cleveland and Baltimore, those stadiums will be approaching the two decade mark in the next five years. Will those designs be seen as passé if attendance hovers in the bottom third of major league teams?
Clearly stadiums are not the big draw for attendance they were sold to the public to be. Poor play over time obviously takes a toll on attendance. But in Pittsburgh attendance was never all that good.
As that famous philosopher Yogi Berra would say, “if people do not want to go to the ballpark, you can’t stop them”
Through nine home games, attendance has averaged 14,337, lowest in the league and about 5 percent below the Florida Marlins, who are next to last. How far fortunes have fallen since the late 1990s when taxpayer subsidies for PNC Park were sold as a way to keep the Pirates here, make the team competitive, and boost attendance. One out of three isn’t too bad, we guess.
Here’s the problem as we noted out in our Issue Summary on attendance: aside from the opening year of the park (2001) and the boost from having the All-Star game here (2006), total attendance is not much different from where it was at Three Rivers Stadium. The taxpayers of the region were promised more than a one year boost in attendance and projections placed it closer to the 2 million level annually. More realistic numbers are in the 1.5 to 1.6 million range. PNC Park attendance has never risen higher than 17th in the league, and that happened in the park’s debut year.
Here’s the other problem: the teams languishing at the bottom of the barrel in attendance with the Pirates include Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. Two of these cities built retro ballparks that inspired the push and design for PNC Park. In the case of Cleveland and Baltimore, those stadiums will be approaching the two decade mark in the next five years. Will those designs be seen as passé if attendance hovers in the bottom third of major league teams?
Clearly stadiums are not the big draw for attendance they were sold to the public to be. Poor play over time obviously takes a toll on attendance. But in Pittsburgh attendance was never all that good.
As that famous philosopher Yogi Berra would say, “if people do not want to go to the ballpark, you can’t stop them”
