While Up From 2021, Early MLB Attendance Shows 5% Decline From Pre-Pandemic Levels

It’s not often that an extreme upward trend is down, but that’s the case with attendance in Major League Baseball heading into mid-June.

Based on data from Baseball-Reference, through June 13, every club in the league, minus one is seeing significant year-over-year attendance increases. And the lone case of the one trending down has a reasonable excuse: it’s the Texas Rangers (down -106,075 overall, or an average of -3,536 per game) who opened their new ballpark last season and benefited from the honeymoon effect of fans coming out to see it for the first time.

Based on data from Major League Baseball, through the first 887 games this year (through Sunday, June 12th), attendance is at 22,629,170 or averaging 25,512 per game. Compared to last season attendance was 10,614,053 for an average of 13,546 per game. That puts the YOY 2022 attendance up +113% versus last season.

For the league, this is of course great news. The bad news is that the pandemic affected the numbers.

To begin the 2021 season, the vast majority of ballparks were operating at limited capacity. As I detailed heading into that season (see the entire list for all 30 teams), attendance ranged from a low of 12% of capacity (Red Sox) to 100% (Texas Rangers). All California ballparks were at 20% as were the two Chicago clubs, the two New York clubs, while the Mariners were at 18%, the Orioles opened at 50% of cap and the Blue Jays were transplanted into their spring training ballpark in Florida where they played to 15% of capacity of their 8,500 seat ballpark (just 1,275 per game).

So, it would make sense that MLB would see a triple-digit increase over the 2021 season.

Whether it is atrophy of returning to pre-pandemic life, the drop in fan interest for the Oakland A’s as their struggles continue to land a new ballpark in the midst of alienating those same fans as key talent was tossed and the front office threatens to move to Las Vegas if taxpayers don’t cough-up considerable funding for not just a new ballpark but ancillary development around it, or the continued increase of strikeouts and drop in balls in play, attendance is down compared to 2019 at this time.

According to the league, year-over-year attendance for 2022 compared to the same point in the 2019 season – the last season before the pandemic – attendance is down -5%.

Should 2022 finish down — throwing out 2020 where no fans were allowed to attend games, and 2021 where ballparks were still at limited capacities to start the season — 2022 would mark the eighth consecutive season with total attendance declines. If the 2022 season were to hold at the 5% decline, it would mark the largest drop since 2009 (-6.6%).

The owners, of course, have to be exceptionally pleased to see numbers rebounding after two consecutive seasons of significant losses. But there are still stark realities in how the league continues to trend downward in paid attendance coming out of pandemic life. Some of it will be how society fully adjusts to the changes in life that occurred in 2020 and 2021. Some of it is a continued decline in attending games in person due to pace-of-play. The question might be, how long can the pandemic be seen as the reason attendance is declining, and how much of it is about the state of play? Maybe the 2023 season will ultimately answer that question.