Attendance woes reaching historic, embarrassing stage
Those expansive, dark green tarps covering Mount Davis at the Coliseum do more than pay homage to the A's glory days. They help hide part of the most unflattering story during the team's five-plus decades in Oakland.
Besides displaying the names and numbers of the A's greatest players, the tarps exist to provide permanent cover for thousands of the ballpark's empty seats. But it would take a lot more of that vinyl mesh to mask the A's current crisis-level attendance problems.
There's no secret why people aren't showing up to their aging, dilapidated home. It's A's ownership dismantling a playoff-caliber roster in the name of future sustainability, while drastically raising season ticket prices amid an ongoing threat to move to Las Vegas, if it can't get a new stadium at the Port of Oakland. To A's fans, that's three strikes — and all but the team's most imperturbable followers are out.
It's been so bad in Oakland that former team executive Andy Dolich found himself compelled to see firsthand what's happened to the franchise he once helped transform from one with 326 season ticket holders in 1980 into the envy of baseball in the early 1990s.
Even saying the A's are last in attendance among baseball's 30 teams fails to properly illustrate the depth of their issues. But this may help: the A's drew a paltry 13,884 fans throughout their just-completed three-game series against the Twins — and it was a nearly 30 percent improvement over their attendance from their previous threegame series.
So far, nearly half of the A's 20 home games have had crowds of fewer than 5,000 fans. Their tiniest crowd was shameful — the A's drew a major-league low 2,488 fans earlier this month against Tampa Bay. It was their smallest Coliseum crowd in 43 years but, because MLB uses tickets sold rather than tickets used for its attendance figures, the true numbers from their 6-1 loss on May 2 were even uglier.
A Coliseum source told this news organization there were actually only 1,452 fans at the stadium during the A's game on May 2.
It wasn't always like this in Oakland. In 1990, the A's had the second-highest attendance in the American League (a franchise-record 2.9 million fans) and the following year they even had the highest payroll in baseball ($33 million). Who knew the Coliseum was once a destination place?
Dolich looks at the A's current marketing efforts and just shakes his head. He sees a confusing ticket campaign that began charging their most loyal customers, season ticket holders, nearly double what they paid a year ago. Then there's the problematic $30 parking price. Then, to spark fan interest recently, the team has undercut those season ticket holders by offering dirt cheap entrance into the park.
“Any time your parking is five times what a ticket price is, you know that there's no strategy involved,” Dolich said. “Any basic marketer in whatever product your offering knows this. There's so many deals available to the customer now that they get confused. A's tickets are two-for-$10 or $5.10, it's this price on a Wednesday, this price on a weekend.
“The A's are offering deals that are destroying the credibility of their product and it hurts that core group of fans.”
As it stands, the A's are drawing a major leagueworst 8,165 fans per game and are on pace to draw just 661,365 fans this season, which would rival the worst attendance by any MLB team over the past 50 years.