This weekend, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox landed in London to play Major League Baseball’s first ever games in Europe. The league wants to grow its presence around the world, and on the surface, this European experiment looks successful. The two games drew a combined 118,718 fans that witnessed an outburst of runs between baseball’s most known franchises and rivals. However, as incredible as this international success seems, I see a problem with this weekend across the pond for MLB.
Attendance has been severely down around the league, and things don’t seem to be improving. Last season MLB averaged fewer than 30,000 fans for the first time since 2003. This year, all it takes is a few shots of the bleachers during MLB Tonight’s live look-ins to notice often half empty stadiums. Through June 29th, more than half of the league’s 30 teams average fewer than 30,000 fans, with eight averaging fewer than 20,000 fans. The most notorious franchises that rarely put fans in the seats are the Miami Marlins, who average a tragic 9,218 fans per game and the Tampa Bay Rays, with an average of 14,530 people going to Tropicana Field.
One might notice the two teams with the lowest attendance are both in Florida. It’s seemingly understandable for the Marlins, who are 17 games under .500, to have low attendance this season, but that would be assuming people went to games when they were good. The Marlins play in a brand new stadium with a retractable roof to protect people from the South Florida sun and rain. Over the years, the Marlins have had superstar players such as Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich and Jose Fernandez, yet they’ve been in the bottom four of attendance every year since 2013 despite that new ballpark opening in 2012. The Marlins won the World Series in 2003, yet that year they ranked 28th in attendance and the next year they ranked 26th. Clearly winning hasn’t helped there.
Over in St. Petersburg, things are similar. Wait, didn’t I say the “Tampa Bay” Rays? Yes, I did, but the Rays actually play in St. Petersburg, which is a huge part of the problem. Tropicana Field is about 22 miles from downtown Tampa. Not only is the distance itself an issue but also the fact that people coming from Tampa must cross a narrow bridge to even get to St. Petersburg, and after that they still must drive deep into the city. These issues have been well documented over the years and constantly have people wondering what the Rays will do, whether it’s build a new stadium or even move away. Just last week, reports surfaced that MLB gave the Rays permission to explore splitting their season, spending some home games in Tampa and the others in Montreal. Apart from being a disaster of an idea, it shows just how desperate MLB is to solve what’s been an ongoing dilemma for many years, which brings us to my question: why is Major League Baseball so concerned with expanding overseas when the game is struggling mightily here in the United States?
Don’t get me wrong; the novelty and excitement of games in exotic cities is great. My family and I tried very hard to try and make it to London as an extension of our trips to see all 30 MLB stadiums that we completed last summer. There’s little doubt both Americans traveling to the games and Europeans seeing baseball for the first time will have a wonderful time, but Commissioner Robert Manfred claims he “would like to have sustained play in Europe” and that apart from London is eager to visit “other cities is Europe.” My view is that instead of putting so much attention toward Europe the league needs to figure things out at home.
The attendance issues are a part of a larger problem baseball has: a declining interest in the sport. A 2018 Gallup poll reveals that only 9% of Americans consider baseball their favorite sport, marking a low since Gallup first asked this question way back in 1937. Baseball ranks well behind football, which 37% of Americans favor, and basketball, which 11% of Americans prefer. Even soccer, long more popular around the world than in the United States, ranks almost evenly with baseball with 7% saying it’s their favorite sport.
With games that many times drag on forever, roughly one-third of the league not even wanting to win and alarmingly weak crowds, baseball faces a critical point in its history in which they must be creative to ensure “America’s Pastime” doesn’t purely mean it’s a game of the past. They should worry more about creating new fans (and holding on to current ones) where the league and its teams call home rather than hoping European cities that show little interest in anything more than a few games here and there will save the sport.