Pirates’ Attendance Two Leagues Down

Attendance at Pittsburgh Pirate home games has slipped to the lowest level among the 30 teams comprising the National and American Leagues. So far in 2009, home attendance is averaging around 15,600, well under the 17,000 plus average in Tampa Bay, which ranks as the second worst attendance. The Pirates are filling just 40 percent of the seats in the highly touted PNC Park that was supposed to attract 30,000 fans per game and provide the revenue to make the team competitive. What a bill of goods that was. The taxpayers will never get a positive return on their investment-an investment they did not want to make.

Meanwhile, the St. Louis Cardinals who play in a similar sized market are drawing over 40,000 per game and in Milwaukee (a smaller metro area than Pittsburgh) the team is pulling over 36,000 per game.

What is the difference? Milwaukee has spent enough money to build a competitive team. St. Louis is simply a far better baseball town. Their attendance was over 40,000 per game for years even in the old Three Rivers Stadium look alike ballpark. Pittsburgh has not been a baseball town in the way St. Louis has been and the owners have chosen for years not to have the kind of payroll of teams who are perennially competitive.

All this was known at the time of the Plan B that sought and got approval for state funds and the allocation of RAD dollars to build PNC Park. The civic and political leadership wanted the new park and despite overwhelming opposition by the public went ahead with Plan B. Ten years later we are now wasting far more additional dollars putting in a subway so people can get to ball games. Preposterous does not begin to describe how wrongheaded these decisions were.