Hill: Inside the numbers on 2013 minor league attendance
From SABR member Benjamin Hill at MiLB.com on January 10, 2014:
If you follow the world of Minor League Baseball, then you probably know that the industry’s 15 leagues and 176 teams once again combined to top the 40 million attendance threshold in 2013. Last year, 41,553,781 passed through the turnstiles, to be exact, a modest 0.7 percent increase over the 2012 campaign.
But did you know that 13 of the 14 highest attendance totals in Minor League history have occurred since 2001? And that the pre-2004 record of 39,640,443 was set in 1949 when Minor League Baseball consisted of a whopping 448 teams in 59 leagues?
These facts, and thousands upon thousands of others, can be found in David Kronheim’s annual Minor League attendance report. The 2013 edition, 91 pages long and divided into 34 sections, is now available as a PDF download on Kronheim’s aptly named website, numbertamer.com. This yearly missive is the most thorough of its kind, and should prove interesting to anyone seeking to get a comprehensive sense of the industry’s strengths and weaknesses. It will also appeal to that thriving subgenre of baseball fans who enjoy the obsessive art of number crunching; of these there are many.
Read the full article here: http://www.milb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20140110&content_id=66453294&fext=.jsp&vkey=min_bus&sid=milb
Originally published: January 10, 2014. Last Updated: January 10, 2014.