Baseball breaks attendance record
By RONALD BLUM, AP Baseball Writer
September 30, 2006
NEW YORK (AP) -- Major League Baseball broke its season attendance record Saturday and was on track to finish with the second-highest per-game average in the sport's history.
Through Friday night, the 30 major league teams had drawn 74,922,200, just shy of the 74,926,174 fans who attended games in 2005, and the record was broken when Minnesota drew 46,219 against the Chicago White Sox in Saturday's first game. The average of 31,348 through Friday was on track to be the highest for a full season, topping 1993's 31,337. The only higher average was in the strike-shortened 1994 season, when baseball averaged 31,632 before players walked out in mid-August.
Yes, the wild card has worked. Yes, interleague play has worked. Yes, revenue sharing has produced parity, which has produced increased attendance in a lot of places," commissioner Bud Selig said. "It's all of the above."
The New York Yankees broke their own American League record, drawing 4,138,605 with two games remaining to top last year's 4,090,692. They joined Toronto (1991-92) as the only major league teams to draw 4 million twice and will finish with the second-highest total for a big league club behind Colorado's record of 4,483,350, set at Denver's Mile High Stadium in 1993, the Rockies' first season.
Six NL teams topped 3 million through Friday: the Los Angeles Dodgers (3,758,545), New York Mets (3,379,535), St. Louis (3,318,677), San Francisco (3,044,713), Chicago Cubs (3,044,123) and Houston (3,022,763). The Los Angeles Angels (3,318,739) were the only other AL team to break 3 million.
Florida (1,106,374) and Pittsburgh (1,801,031) were the only NL teams that failed to draw 2 million. Tampa Bay (1,368,950), Kansas City (1,372,638) and Oakland (1,976,625) fell short in the AL, with Cleveland set to top 2 million on the final weekend.
Amazing that all those teams in the last paragraph (except Oakland) did better than the Marlins...
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ap-attendance&prov=ap&type=lgns