25% capacity
Will Thursday be the Milwaukee Brewers’ smallest opening day crowd ever? Not exactly.
Usually, opening day is Milwaukee’s biggest party.
This year, not so much. Stupid pandemic.
This month, the Milwaukee Brewers unveiled plans to have just 11,000 to 12,000 fans in American Family Field — about 25% of the ballpark’s posted capacity of 41,900 — as part of its COVID-19 safety plan. That’s better than last year’s fans-free season but a ghost town compared to recent years, when attendance has averaged more than 31,000.
While the stadium might feel a little empty with only 12,000 fans in it, the April 1 opener against the Minnesota Twins still won’t be Milwaukee’s smallest opening-day crowd.
Rain, a players strike and a mess of a field
1972 was the Brewers’ third season in Milwaukee, and it got off to a rocky start. The first-ever players strike — over an increase in ballplayer pensions — delayed the start of play until April 15, wiping out the originally scheduled opening day at County Stadium. After the Brewers lost two games out of three on the road, their fourth game was rained out.
So the Brewers came home — to temperatures in the 30s and more rain.
The rescheduled home opener, set for April 21 against the Detroit Tigers, was washed out. (Remember: County Stadium didn’t have a retractable roof.) The team hoped that the weather would be better the next day, a Saturday.
It wasn’t.
The rain finally stopped, but the cold and gusty winds didn’t. Temperatures peaked at 41 degrees.
The team mustered up some pregame entertainment, courtesy of the local R&B group Black Society, and a Milwaukee baseball celebrity: Bill Bruton, whose 10th inning home run won the Milwaukee Braves’ first home opener at County Stadium in 1953.
But even with kids getting in for just $1, only 8,968 fans showed up, slightly less than 20% of County Stadium’s 1972 capacity of 45,768 people.
To make things worse, the Brewers lost, 8-2, getting fewer hits (two) than errors (four).
The field was a mess, too.
The Milwaukee Journal’s Cleon Walfoort wrote that the right-center half of the outfield “appeared entirely bare but actually was covered by brown grass that never had recovered from the ice and cold of a cold spring. A spot immediately behind shortstop had been patched with sand. …
“Someone else thought the outfield looked as if the Milwaukee River had been channeled through it all winter, and the overwhelming consensus was that the playing field has not been in as bad shape in the 19 years the stadium has been used for Major League Baseball.”
Opening day proved a sign of things to come for the 1972 Brewers. The team finished sixth in the six-team American League East, with a win-loss record of 65-91, seven games behind the fifth-place Cleveland Indians. Manager Dave Bristol was fired 30 games into the season, and eventually replaced by former Braves catcher Del Crandall.
The Brewers drew 600,440 fans for the entire 1972 season. For comparison, in 2019, the last year the Brewers played in front of fans at Miller Park, the team’s attendance passed the 600,000 mark on May 3, 34 games into the season, when they beat the New York Mets, 3-1.
First, and last, in the American League
Technically, the 1972 home opener didn’t have the smallest opening-day attendance in Milwaukee’s majorleague history.
In 1901, in the first year that the American League was considered a major league, the Milwaukee Brewers drew 3,000 people to the Lloyd Street Grounds for their home opener on May 3. That was about half the capacity of the old wooden ballpark at West Lloyd and North 16th streets.
Just like in 1972, the Brewers got clobbered, losing to the eventual pennant winners, the Chicago White Sox, 11-3. It was cold that day, too.
Milwaukee ended the season in last place in the eight-team AL, drawing just 139,034 fans. After the season, the team moved to St. Louis.
Sources for this story included Journal Sentinel archives, baseball-alma nac.com and baseball-reference.com.
Contact Chris Foran at chris.foran @jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @cforan12.