Attendance for ‘reopening’ turns out to be disappointing
A’s officials billed the weekend series against the Boston Red Sox as their official reopening, but the series hosted a disappointing turnout.
Though 32,304 showed up for Friday’s game with the lure of a postgame fireworks show — and the A’s announced 24 hours prior to first pitch that they’d stopped selling tickets because BART would not run past 10:10 p.m. — only 13,070 showed up to the Coliseum to watch the Fourth
of July day game and 16,297 attended Saturday’s thrilling 12-inning game.
The A’s opened up the Coliseum to full capacity for the first time since 2019 on June 29 for a mid-week series against the Texas Rangers and turned out just over 14,000 fans over the three-game series. Team officials justified the lowest non-COVID-restricted attendance in 24 years for Tuesday’s game and lowest in 34 years for Wednesday’s game with a promise that turnout would be significant for the weekend series.
Instead, 61,000 showed up to watch the first-place Red Sox — who typically draw a decent crowd — make their lone Bay Area visit to play the A’s throughout the three-game series over the Holiday weekend. A’s president Dave Kaval said, the team expected more of an “uptick” for the midweek series and expected bigger crowds for the weekend. The crowds were bigger, but signs
may be pointing to low turnout to watch the team with the third-best record in the American League.
“I think it remains to be seen how the balance of the season goes, and we’re going to keep redoubling our efforts to get the word out and encourage people to see the exciting baseball that’s being played here,” Kaval said before the weekend series against the RedSox.
Those efforts are nearly nonexistent from a promotional standpoint. Friday’s fireworks show was and is the only promotional event on the calendar for the A’s. Save for a Friday family deal with parking, the A’s have no package or giveaway nights — no bobbleheads, T-shirts or other trinkets given away at the door. After hosting Pride Night and African American Heritage Day, the A’s have no more “heritage” games or other promotional events on the schedule.
To compare, the San Francisco Giants have a heritage or promotional night for nearly every home game left on their schedule with free giveaways most weekends.
There appears to be two more big-ticket weekend series left on their schedule that could draw bigger crowds for the A’s. They have a threegame series against the Giants starting Aug. 20 to complete the Bay Bridge Series, and a four-game series the following weekend against the New York Yankees. But if the Red Sox series was any indication, those crowds might not be brimming.
Attendance has been an issue at the Coliseum for decades. Infamously, a group of 250 fans dotted the seats for an April game against the Mariners in 1979. Kaval says the current low attendance “further cements” the A’s position that a new venue would be a solution to getting attendancenumbersup. “The facility in its current condition — even with championship plaza, marketing and the Treehouse — it’s a challenge to attract fans to this location in the numbers necessary to support a Major League team,” he said. “And obviously this last homestand was case in point.”
With COVID-19 restrictions, the A’s 5,510 average attendance ranked second-tolast in the majors. Only the Blue Jays averaged fewer fans, and they are playing their games at their minor-league affiliate ballparks in Dunedin, Florida and Buffalo, New York until Canada allows the team to travel in and out of the country.