Arizona Diamondbacks attendance ahead of 2016

The early 2017 attendance number for the D-backs were dismal, and it looked all but certain that the team would fail to crack two million fans for the year, for the first time in franchise history. Things reached their absolute depths on April 26, when only 12,215 people officially attended (and likely fewer were actually there) a Tuesday night game at Chase Field against the Padres. That was easily the smallest crowd in franchise history, almost two thousand below the previous worst of 14,110 - also against the Padres.

That was the pattern for much of the first two months, with 24 of the first 28 home games showing a drop compared to the equivalent the previous year. On May 23, after 17,865 attended a game against the White Sox, the team was already over a hundred thousand down, compared to the same stage last year. That was 3,619 down per game to that point: never mind sub-two million, that would project to being below 1,750,000 this season. But 48 hours earlier, the team officially announced their summer pass, which quite possibly turned it all around. A mere $50 gave fans access to every home game in June and July, and the results were instantaneous.

The 4,000 passes available were sold out in just three days. I’m not certain how the passes are tallied: do they count, even if the holder does not go to a specific game? But even if that’s true - leading to an automatic four thousand bump - the impact on attendance appears to have been even greater. The first two games covered were on June 6 and 7, and were a stern test of interest, being against the Padres, responsible for the previous two record low crowds, as noted above. But they actually outdrew the games on the same Tuesday and Wednesday in 2016 (against the reasonably comparable Rays) by a total of more than thirteen thousand.

Something similar continued for the rest of the pass validity. There have been a total of eleven dates in June and July where we can directly compare 2017 attendance, to a game on the same day of the week and week of the month as in 2016. Overall, crowds on those contests increased by more than fifty thousand, close to 4,600 per game. You can see the details on the table below, which matches up the attendance for home games, across last year and this. Across all 22 so far at Chase in June and July, crowds are up by more than 105,000, compared to home games #30-51 in 2016.

The result has been to pull attendance back up, to a level which passed the rate for 2016 after Saturday night’s contest, and is currently 6,414 ahead of the same stage last year. The chart below illustrates how significantly things have turned around for crowds at Chase during the period of the summer pass. It shows the overall difference in total attendance after each of the 51 home games to date. You can see how it started out heading relentless down, to the May 23 low noted previously, but has since recovered strongly, back to and now slightly above the same numbers at this point last year.

If sustained, the current figure would give a total of 2,046,403 for 2017. The key words there are, “if sustained”. The summer pass comes to an end after this week’s series against Atlanta, and it will be very interesting to see what happens to crowds. The team next returns to Phoenix for a home-stand against the Dodgers, Cubs and Astros beginning on August 8. On the downside, there will be no more pass boost. On the other hand, those contests against other contenders promise to be highly meaningful baseball games, something which has been in very short supply around town over the last four or five Augusts, and so should draw significant walk-up sales.

What impact this will have in the longer term also remains to be seen. We all know how much of a bandwagon market there is in Phoenix: fans here love winning teams, and have little or no interest in losers. A significant playoff run - and I probably mean anything past the wild-card - would likely lead to a winter bump in season ticket sales and renewals, and feed into a potentially promising increase for 2018. But if there’s a stretch meltdown, and the team misses out entirely on post-season play, we’ll probably hear a collective sigh of “Same old Diamondbacks...” and the local consciousness will quickly go right back largely to ignoring the team.