Major League Baseball (MLB) is struggling to fill the stands at pre-COVID levels as the sport heads into the last 2 1/2 months of its first season since 2019 without capacity restrictions, the Associated Press reported. MLB reached the All-Star break with an average attendance of 26,409. That represents a drop of 5.4% from the All-Star break of 2019 — which was 10 days earlier than this year. League officials remain encouraged and point to the recovery. Attendance is up over 70% from the season-ending average in 2021, when only Texas started at full capacity and all 30 teams weren’t at 100% until July 2. MLB played its abbreviated 2020 regular season without spectators. While MLB’s average attendance had fallen each year since 2015, most of the drops were by less than 2%. Average attendance was over 30,000 for 14 straight seasons from 2004-17 but hasn’t reached that mark since. Bob Heaning, of Cranford, N.J., said that he used to attend about a dozen New York Yankees games per year. He’s attended just three this season, has tickets for two more games and doesn’t plan to attend any others. Heaning said he stopped going as often because he bought a house last year and is staying at home more often, but he also believes the high price of attending games may be keeping fans away. That could prove particularly true this year as inflation causes more people to spend more carefully. MLB relies more than other professional sports leagues on out-of-town fans, which makes it particularly vulnerable to issues that could curtail tourism.
