September 21, 1966: Cubs beat Reds before lowest attendance ever at Wrigley Field

The sky was overcast for the Wednesday afternoon matchup between the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds at Wrigley Field on September 21, 1966. School had been in session for weeks and the Cubs were at the bottom of the National League standings. With the season in its next-to-last week, the Reds were in seventh place in the 10-team NL. As Chicago Tribune writer Richard Dozer described, “The Cubs won, 9 to 3, in the semi-privacy which only 530 spectators can provide.”1 As of 2024, it remained the least-attended Cubs’ game at Wrigley Field, their home since the 1916 season.2

The Cubs, who had not finished higher than in fifth place since 1946, were 35½ games behind the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers.3 Nineteen years after a record 46,572 fans packed Wrigley Field on May 18, 1947, for Jackie Robinson’s first visit with the Brooklyn Dodgers, attendance had declined with the club’s won-lost record. Only 15,396 showed up for Chicago’s 1966 home opener on April 19, and the gate topped 30,000 only once that season.4

Weekday crowds at the majors’ only ballpark without lights had become especially small. A week earlier, the Cubs’ September 14 game against the Atlanta Braves had drawn just 961 fans. The series opener with the Reds on September 20 – a 13-inning loss that dropped Chicago’s record to 54-97 – was only 1,041.

To compete with the “lovable losers” were the struggling Reds, who had traded star outfielder Frank Robinson in the offseason and were headed for their first losing season since 1960. The Reds were managed by 33-year-old Dave Bristol, who took over in mid-July after Don Heffner, a first-year big-league manager himself, was fired.

The 530 people at Wrigley Field saw a matchup of Chicago’s Ken Holtzman and Cincinnati’s Sammy Ellis. Twenty-year-old Holtzman, pitching between attending classes at the University of Illinois-Chicago, had won a team-leading nine games in his first full major-league season. Ellis had a 22-win season in 1965, when he made the NL All-Star team, but he entered this start with a 5.30 ERA and had been knocked out in the first inning three days earlier against the Braves.

The Cubs scored in the first when Don Kessinger led off with a single, stole second, and came home on Ron Santo’s two-out single. Three more Cubs’ runs followed in the third, after Kessinger again set the table with a leadoff single. One out later, Billy Williams hit a two-run home run, his 29th of the season. Santo followed by smacking a triple and scoring on Ernie Banks’ sacrifice fly, increasing the lead to 4-0.

Pete Rose’s one-out double in the fourth, his 200th hit of the season, was Cincinnati’s first hit against Holtzman. Lee May fanned, but Don Pavletich singled Rose home to put the Reds on the scoreboard.

Holtzman struck out three more Reds in the fifth around Leo Cárdenas’s single, giving the left-hander eight strikeouts. But Cincinnati chipped away and made it a 4-3 ballgame in the sixth after Tommy Helms – headed for NL Rookie of the Year honors – led off with a single and Rose hit his 16th homer of the season.

Chicago capitalized on Ellis’s wildness in the bottom of the sixth. Banks and George Altman walked to start the inning and Randy Hundley bunted the runners up. With Holtzman on deck, the Reds intentionally walked Adolfo Phillips to load the bases.

Cubs manager Leo Durocher sent Lee Thomas up to pinch-hit for Holtzman. The runners held on Thomas’s fly out to shallow center, but Kessinger came through with his third hit of the game, a two-out, two-strike line-drive single to left, scoring Banks and Altman for a 6-3 lead.

The Cubs put the game away in the eighth when Phillips – who had come to Chicago in an April 1966 trade that also brought Fergie Jenkins from the Philadelphia Phillies – followed singles by Altman and Hundley with a three-run homer, making the score 9-3. Later in the inning, Kessinger singled again to cap his third four-hit game in three weeks; the 24-year-old shortstop had hit .330 in 24 games since August 26.

Cal Koonce, who had taken over for Holtzman in the seventh, closed out the Cubs’ win with three scoreless innings. The only hit against Koonce was Rose’s eighth-inning single, his third hit of the game. Batting .415 since July 27, Rose had raised his average from .268 to .321.

The Cubs had successfully converted a close 4-3 game to a rout. Holtzman earned his 10th win.5 Ellis picked up his 18th loss against 12 wins. The Reds used four pitchers, which made it 32 pitchers in their stretch of seven losses in eight games.6

The Cubs finished 1966 with a 59-103 record and an overall home attendance of 635,891, their second-lowest total since World War II.7 But their late-season performance, including a 27-32 record after August 1, trended toward the improvement they’d have in 1967 and beyond. With young players like Kessinger, Phillips, Hundley, Holtzman, and Jenkins joining veterans Banks, Santo, and Williams, the Cubs bettered their ’66 win total by 28 games in 1967, finishing third in the NL at 87-74-1.

It was the first of six straight winning seasons for the Cubs.  They were still finding themselves as a team. The nucleus of a respectable but underachieving ballclub was forming at this time. Their 1969 team would go on to be adored by Cub fans for a generation – albeit noted for a late-season collapse. Season attendance at Wrigley Field increased to 977,226 in 1967, and the Cubs drew more than 1.6 million each year from 1969 through 1971. Among the 12 NL clubs in 1971, only the Dodgers and New York Mets had a higher total attendance.

September 21, 1966, was the last time the official attendance at Wrigley Field was under 1,000. Through the 1970s, a handful of major-league games – many of them in September when the home team was out of contention – had announced crowds below 1,000.8 Between 1959 and 1966 there were 12 games at Wrigley, all in late September, for which the Cubs announced an attendance of less than 1,000.

Although season tickets were available in this era, not many purchased a season’s worth of tickets. It had not become a concept that fans were comfortable with and knew how to utilize. Also, the format to quantify attendance figures then were direct turnstile counts, not “tickets sold,” as they have been since 1967 in the AL and 1993 in the NL.9

Only one major-league game since the 1970s has had an announced crowd under 1,000, outside of games played without any spectators because of the 2020 COVID pandemic and a crowdless game in Baltimore during civil unrest in 2015.10 The lowest at Wrigley Field since 1966 was on Thursday, September 24, 1981, when 2,555 attended a contest with the Mets. The Cubs’ lowest home attendance since 1993 was 5,267 on June 1, 2000, a rescheduled makeup for the previous day’s rainout.

As of 2024 the Cubs, and their charming ballpark, average over 30,000 per game, and not only due to the change in tallying attendance. In 1966 Wrigley Field was not viewed as a throwback that baseball fans would make a pilgrimage to in adoration as it is today, nor had the surrounding neighborhood been developed into a destination for pre- and postgame entertainment. The September 1966 Cubs-Reds game that drew only 530 fans represented the low-water mark of an era of losing baseball on the North Side of Chicago.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Gary Belleville and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the sources listed in the Notes below, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for pertinent information, including the box score and play-by-play. 

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN196609210.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1966/B09210CHN1966.htm

Photo credit: Don Kessinger, Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Richard Dozer, “Cubs Defeat Reds, 9 to 3, Before 530,” Chicago Tribune, September 22, 1966: 74.

2 During the COVID-shortened 2020 season, the Cubs played 33 games at Wrigley Field with no spectators in attendances, per safety protocols.

3 Al Yellon, “The Day Only 530 People Paid to See a Cub Game,” Bleed Cubbie Blue Blog, September 22, 2016, https://www.bleedcubbieblue.com/2016/9/22/13015498/cubs-attendance-530-september-1966.

4 The Cubs drew a crowd of 30,931 for a Sunday doubleheader with the St. Louis Cardinals on July 24. On that day, the Cubs honored longtime player, manager, coach, executive, and broadcaster Charlie Grimm. Edward Prell, “Jar Cards, 10-7; Then Lose, 7-4,” Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1966: 3,1.

5 Four days later, on September 25, Holtzman took a no-hitter into the ninth inning against the first place Dodgers. He finished with a two-hit complete game in the Cubs’ 2-1 win, outdueling Los Angeles ace Sandy Koufax. A Sunday crowd of 21,659 attended the game.

6 Bill Ford, “Bruins Make Sammy Run, 9-3,” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 22, 1966: 44.

7 In 1962, when the Cubs also went 59-103, they drew a total of 609,802.

8 For example, the day after the Cubs and Reds played for 530 fans, just 413 spectators were at Yankee Stadium to see the 10th-place New York Yankees host the Chicago White Sox in the makeup of a rained-out game. Four days later, on September 26, only 485 were at D.C. Stadium in Washington for a doubleheader, also a rainout makeup, between the eighth-place Washington Senators and ninth-place Boston Red Sox. A search of Stathead.com, which uses data from Baseball-Reference.com, revealed 13 games in the 1970s with crowds of fewer than 1,000, 34 from the 1960s, and 23 from the 1950s.

9 Andy McCue, Stumbling Around the Bases: The American League’s Mismanagement in the Expansion Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2022), 79-80; Paul Meyer, “NL Switches Attendance Policy,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 28, 1993: D-13.

10 On April 9, 1997, the Chicago White Sox and Toronto Blue Jays had a paid attendance of 746 at Chicago’s Comiskey Park (later known as U.S. Cellular Field and Guaranteed Rate Field) for a game played in 34-degree weather. Phil Rogers, “Sox Without Much Spring These Days,” Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1997: 4, 1.