Marlins Park attendance

[gypcasino]

Laughably pathetic for their first real series of the year. Announced attendance last night 7k less than capacity and tons of empty seats tonight again.

[Hitman_Hart]

It's not surprising. Miami isn't a baseball town, and the only reason they have that park is due to a massive instance of corporate fraud committed against the city. They'll have even fewer "fans"in attendance when it gets Florida hot, and the team is way out of contention.

[1992casey]

I don't see anything pathetic at this point. Last night's attendance was 30,169 and tonight's was 31,659.

 

These were the numbers for the first nine regular season games at Miller Park:

 

[pre]Friday, April 6, 2001 42,024

Saturday, April 7, 2001 40,651

Sunday, April 8, 2001 34,077

Tuesday, April 10, 2001 23,577

Wednesday, April 11, 2001 26,021

Thursday, April 12, 2001 23,599

Friday, April 13, 2001 34,998

Saturday, April 14, 2001 42,080

Sunday, April 15, 2001 25,981[/pre]

[gypcasino]

Yeah, a little early to start drawing conclusions I suppose. We did get 2.8 million that year. I hope the Marlins get they get the 2.4-2.8 million they're predicting but it's going to be tough. I look at it as being summer all the time in Florida, which if it was like that here it would provide a boost to April attendance. How much I'm not sure since yeah it's mid week April during the school year so maybe not that much.

[Invader3K]

The fans down there have been burned by the ownership so much, the Marlins are going to have to prove they're serious about contending. I can't really see the weather being a legitimate factor for bad attendance, with the retractable roof they have.

[pebadger]

The Miami market has all the cynicism of the NE corridor markets but without the hardcore base. It's simply not a very good sports "town" if you can call a sprawling metro like that a town. That's fine. Not everyplace needs to be a sports town. Times have changed and there's now been a generation of kids growing up with the Marlins as the local team, but there used to be no question that there were both more Yankees and Mets fans in South Florida than Marlins fans.

[owbc]

Way too many people bashing the Marlins for no good reason. And that includes the local media and almost everyone not familiar with the situation. It seems like people want baseball to fail down here, I don't get it. Three consecutive crowds of 30,000+. From what I can tell, the last time that happened was the final week of the 2003 season. There were probably only about 10 games last season when there were more than 10,000 people actually in the seats. I would estimate that many games had 2,000-3,000 fans.

 

Not to mention the other intangibles that you don't see without being down here. The Marlins are "cool" again. You see the new Marlins gear everywhere. The team is in the local sports conversation. And it looks like the Clevelander behind the left field fence is one of the craziest places to watch a game in all of baseball.

 

Everything about the ballpark is great. People really like it. The parking issue has turned out not to be a major problem. The Ozzie issue seems to be a bigger story in Bristol than it is in Miami.

 

I don't get it at all. Milwaukee should know better, since the Brewers have been the subject of unnecessary media bashing many times.

[pebadger]

It will be great if things work out down there for the Marlins. The worst thing that ever happened to sports in South Florida, IMO, was moving the Dolphins out of the city. I think there is a lot to be said (and more than was realized) for just having that anchor right in Miami itself. For too long people wanted to move sports out to the suburbs (in a lot of places) and make everything uber-convenient for a certain segment of the audience. I think there is a lot to be said for having stadia/arenas right in the heart of cities and making going to the game a bit more exciting than just going to an edge-city mall/theatre complex. Obviously you can't make it terribly inconvenient for people to go, but I think people have figured out that building a non-descript venue in the middle of a field somewhere is no longer the right answer. The old Orange Bowl was great, but as times/people changed it had outlived its usefulness. Maybe the new Marlins park can capture some of that, at least to the degree that sports can capture public imagination as much as they used to.

[brettac1]

I have been watching their home games and it's clear that it's a lot of fans that don't really follow baseball. I don't like Heath Bell at all, but booing him in like his third game? Seriously? I can see them easily having a hard time drawing by the end of the season, since I don't think they are really that good of a team - especially if Giancarlo and LoMo are going to be hurt all year and only playing 60% of the games.

[Funketown]

Let's not forget the Brewers were still pretty much horrendously awful during their first season in Miller Park.

 

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. If there's ever a season for the Marlins to become a big deal in Miami, it's this one. New ballpark, exciting team, new logo, etc.

[lj854]

Let's not forget the Brewers were still pretty much horrendously awful during their first season in Miller Park.

 

This is a key point. Big difference between the 2001 Brewers and this year's Marlins team, which made a lot of noise in the off-season.

[Bigblast]

Lets see what kind of numbers they draw later this year and next especially if the team is average or worse . I bet theyll be struggling to get to get out of the lower 20,000's in attendance. If that happens then the new stadium is a big waste of money. Rememember the greater Miami area is the 8th largest city in the usa, they should do much better than this.

[homer]

I've been watching Steven Fry in America on Netflix (it's a 6 part doc about a British man experiencing the US) and he had absolutely nothing good to say about Miami.

 

Not sure why I mention that here but felt it was slightly relevant.

[RightFieldCoder]

Last night's attendance for the defending NL Central champs: 27,159. April is just a hard draw in a lot of places. I'm not going to dump on Miami for low attendance until I see the whole season.

[Bigblast]

Last nights attendance (4/17) in Miami was 25,455.

[JohnBriggs12]

The biggest problem Miami has is that its an area with a lot of transplants, not unlike Phoenix, Tampa/St. Pete, and even Atlanta to a certain extent. Those towns tend not be great sports towns. I think if the Marlins win, they'll create enough of a buzz to draw, but to expect a dormant fan base to suddenly fill up a place every night is unrealistic.

 

Besides, Selig has further devalued the regular season by adding another playoff team. Miami is focused on the Heat now and April games are tough sells.

[brewtown82]

"Besides, Selig has further devalued the regular season by adding another playoff team. Miami is focused on the Heat now and April games are tough sells."

 

I don't agree with that statement. The extra playoff team is essentially just making it harder to get into the playoffs proper, because not only do you have to make the wild card, you have to win a one-off playoff game to boot. If anything, this makes the regular season more important.

[Funketown]

It's probably also worth remembering that the Miami MSA has about 5.5 million residents to Milwaukee's 1.5 million.

 

(Side note: Milwaukee's MSA population is about 1.56 million. The next smallest MLB MSA is Kansas City, which is about 2.05 million)

[1992casey]

If you want to debate the pluses and minuses of the extra Wild Card, please use this topic:

 

MLB Playoffs to expand in 2012

[pepsimax23]

this would be a fun topic to expand upon. i think best case scenario was cleveland, when they moved from the dump (mistake by the lake) and went into utopia of something like 500+ sellouts in a row at "the jake". (anyone remember that run, every announcer couldnt get over the effect of the addition of the rock and roll hall of fame what a renaissance cleveland was experiencing)

 

i distinctly remember first year miller park 2001 attending a 2nd series game vs houston astros. that there were tens of thousands of empty seats and a leaky roof. i also remember going to many brewers merchandise liquidation sales 2003 offseason with awesome commemorative items for $1 - $5 when team was as unpopular as it ever was (critics = oh what a debacle it was to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a sports team facility).

 

fast forward ten years. i dont think youll find anyone who says that investment to maintain MLB was a dreadful mistake. funny that right now, the same debate perpetuates about maintaining NBA downtown.

[Funketown]

I know there was a study on the determinants of attendance for EPL football teams and they found that the quality of the stadium is actually as important or more important than the quality of the team. I'm not overly confident the same would be true for MLB, but it's interesting to think about nonetheless.

[owbc]

Good discussion here. There is definitely a problem that some people don't like baseball down here. I am talkng about the young people that I talk to who are native. This is an important distinction. The transplants live in Broward and Palm Beach. The ballpark is in Miami. Driving from Palm Beach to Miami is like driving from Milwaukee to Chicago. It's like a completely different city. That was part of the supposed benefit of putting a football/baseball stadium near the turnpike where it was easy to get at from both sides and name the team the "Florida" Marlins to represent all of South Florida. The result? A failure. Not surprising if you think about it--the weather was one factor--older people are less inclined to put up with bad weather--and they also already had other allegiances. I think weather and the bad stadium were the top 2 factors since attendance was still pathetic when popular teams showed up and the roof doesn't help the Rays much. Sun Life was the worst stadium in MLB and it wasn't even close.

 

It seems like you can get a really good positive feedback when you have a new stadium combined with a winning team. The causal fans and media are already paying more attention because of the ballpark and when the team plays well, word really gets out and the success carries over for a number of years. The Marlins are trying to replicate that. If not, attendance will drop, but when the team eventually has success, it will be easier to get the fans back in because the stadium is nice. It's just frustrating to hear the garbage about how baseball isn't popular in Florida and Marlins Park will go a long way towards changing that if people get rid of their preconceptions and see that virtually every city with a bad ballpark had the same problems that the Marlins did with attendance. The only year the Marlins were contenders for the whole year was 1997 and they had above-average attendance that year. And the offseason moves after that year didn't exactly inspire fan loyalty.

[Bigblast]

this would be a fun topic to expand upon. i think best case scenario was cleveland, when they moved from the dump (mistake by the lake) and went into utopia of something like 500+ sellouts in a row at "the jake". (anyone remember that run, every announcer couldnt get over the effect of the addition of the rock and roll hall of fame what a renaissance cleveland was experiencing)

 

i distinctly remember first year miller park 2001 attending a 2nd series game vs houston astros. that there were tens of thousands of empty seats and a leaky roof. i also remember going to many brewers merchandise liquidation sales 2003 offseason with awesome commemorative items for $1 - $5 when team was as unpopular as it ever was (critics = oh what a debacle it was to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a sports team facility).

 

fast forward ten years. i dont think youll find anyone who says that investment to maintain MLB was a dreadful mistake. funny that right now, the same debate perpetuates about maintaining NBA downtown.

 

You still do hear from the people that think spending any tax money no matter how small for a sports facility is wrong and as you see every time there is an article about the tax on jsonline those people still [expletive deleted --1992] and moan about how wrong they think it is and that if the Brewers weren't here the supposed money would be spent on something else in the city. I think they're full of crap and for the most part you are correct but there are people that disagree with building it.