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Major League Baseball remains on track to eke out a very small attendance increase for the 2025 season, but recent data shows a widening spread between teams, similar to what’s happening in other facets of the sport.
The league is currently averaging 29,236 per game, just 22 people above the comparable mark from last year, representing a 0.07% increase. League officials, after a full season of optimism in this area, remain hopeful that the final figures will produce a third straight year above 70 million, which hasn’t happened in this critical metric since 2015–17, and then in a declining fashion.
“We’re having another great attendance year, we’re going to be above 70 million again,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a recent appearance on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball.
Winners Draw, Losers Drift
The final stretch of the season, however, can also be fraught with more challenging situations, particularly among teams out of the playoff race. The expanded, 14-team playoff field was designed, in part, to mitigate that, but recent weeks have seen some ugly history being made in some markets.
The Twins, already in the midst of large-scale transition and fan unrest, drew a collective total of 36,813 this week for the final three games of a four-game home series against the White Sox, all losses to the American League’s worst team. That combined figure would not even fill Target Field once, and it follows the team posting a series of non-pandemic lows at the 15-year-old ballpark. Minnesota is also on track to post by far the worst full-season market at Target Field, excluding 2020 and 2021.
The Cardinals, similarly, had an announced attendance of 17,002 against the A’s on Tuesday, the worst mark at the current Busch Stadium since it opened in 2006, again excluding the pandemic.
The A’s, meanwhile, continue to have their own challenges in the first year of a three-season interim stay in Sacramento while a new ballpark in Las Vegas is built. The team has not reached 10,000 for any single home game at Sutter Health Park there since the All-Star break, after regularly doing so in the season’s first half. Perhaps not coincidentally, the club has already unveiled plans to play two home series next season at Las Vegas Ballpark, the home venue of their top minor-league affiliate.
Those situations contrast against other attendance success stories in the league, particularly the Mets, which still have the league’s biggest increase with a 39% surge to more than 39,000 per game. The Padres, meanwhile, are assured of setting a franchise record for a third straight season and will move past the prior mark of 3.3 million set last year.
That accelerating split parallels a growing fiscal divide in the league, one that will be central in labor negotiations next year between the league and the MLB Players Association.
