Diamondbacks Gameday Thread, #43: 5/16 @ Athletics

Last night’s announced attendance of 2,064 in Oakland was the smallest crowd in front of which the D-backs have ever played, outside the 2020 audience-free campaign. Even the 2021 season, when stadia were limited in capacity, never reached such a low. The smallest attendance that year was a game on May 5 in Miami, when there were only 3,573 present. All three games that series totaled only 11,520. There were also two games in Oakland that season with 3,695 and 4.090 respectively. But under “normal” circumstances, the least-attended game was in not dissimilar circumstances to the A’s. It came during the 2001 season in Montreal, at the end of which owners voted to contract the Expos and Twins.

From May 1-3 that year, the D-backs played a three-game set in Olympic Stadium, none of which reached even five thousand in attendance. The crowds that series of 4,340, 4,352 and 4,788 were the three smallest non-COVID audiences for Arizona, up until last night. Indeed, games there in various other mean the NINE least attended games in franchise history were all in the same Canadian ballpark (again, discounting 2021). Here’s the full list of D-backs games with the smallest crowds. Miami also have more than their fair share of entrants toward the top of that list. They and Oakland currently rank 29th and 30th in attendance, averaging 12,828 and 9,129 per game respectively.

If you limit it just to Chase Field, the bottom 25 games all come from 2021, bottoming out with 5,560 against - surprise! - the Marlins on May 11. They’re also responsible for the smallest non-COVID crowd, on May 10 last year, when 8,855 were in attendance. At the other end, the largest audience in front of which the D-backs have ever played, came back in 1999, on a Saturday night at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, a T-shirt giveaway game on May 24. 61,674 were present for that, which was the largest regular season crowd in Padres history to that point. The home mark for AZ is actually as recently as 2019: 50,818 crammed in on August 31 for a Dodgers game, more than any post-season contest.