5 Baseball Teams Could Lose Over 3 Million Fans in Ballparks

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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5 Baseball Teams Could Lose Over 3 Million Fans in Ballparks

© Christian Petersen / Getty Images Sport via Getty Images

Major League Baseball has told the Major League Baseball Players Association that there will be 60 games this year, followed by a normal playoff schedule. There is a chance the players could turn down the owners. Whatever the conclusion is, without fans in the seats, five teams probably will watch their fan attendance drop from over 3 million a year to zero. This will be the case if the league never lets people back into stadiums because of the risks of COVID-19 infection.

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In the 2019 season, the Los Angeles Dodgers had the largest annual attendance for home games. Most teams would have had 81 home games. That represents a loss of 3,974,309 people for the Dodgers. Next on the list of teams ranked by ballpark attendance, the St. Louis Cardinals had 3,480,393 last year. That was followed by the New York Yankees, which had an attendance of 3,304,404. After that, the Chicago Cubs had an attendance of 3,094,865 and the Los Angeles Angels had 3,023,010.

Another 13 teams had an attendance of between 2 million and 3 million during the course of the season. Eleven teams had an attendance of between 1 million and 2 million.

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One financial drawback of games without fans in stadiums, after a huge loss in ticket sales, is the cost to maintain empty facilities. Fortunately, those costs are relatively small. Much of the electricity bills are gone. So are clean up and repairs of damage done by fans. However, that is not much comfort.

Televised games are not of much interest to the fan bases of the MLB teams. Tens of millions of fans won’t have anywhere, in stadiums, to sit.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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