Cincinnati Reds have attendance woes despite competitive start to 2017

The Cincinnati Red are last in the National League Central in the stat that matters most, attendance.

For a purportedly small market division, the Cincinnati Reds have some of the best competitors to have as rivals.  The Chicago Cubs and Saint Louis Cardinals both have stadiums that are more expensive to get into.  The Reds also have the Pittsburgh Pirates only a short drive away.

The Reds rank last in the NL in average home attendance just behind the mercurial Pirates.  Three of the five AL teams with smaller average home attendance are in the American League Central.  The other two are the Oakland Athletics and the Tampa Bay Rays.

Thanks to who they have played, the Reds are ranked 10th in MLB in road attendance.  They have played at Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Saint Louis twice.  Visiting Saint Louis is even a bigger deal than Chicago since the new Busch stadium has been built.

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So overall, the Reds rank 21st in average attendance.  Only the Miami Marlins, however, are behind them in the NL.  With the Kansas City Royals one spot ahead of the Reds and every other AL Central team behind them, the AL Central is a division in trouble competitively, financially speaking.

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The Cincinnati Reds are on pace to have their worst season at GABP since they opened the stadium.

Since the Reds moved into Great American Ballpark back in 2003, they have only had total attendance numbers below 2,000,000 three times: 2005, 2009, and last season.  This year they are on pace for the second lowest average attendance and, because of stadium updates that started in 2013, the lowest percentage of seats sold since the park opened.  Right now the Red are on pace to fall just short of 1.8-million fans in attendance.

Despite all of the complaints about the ballpark holding the Reds back when they played in Riverfront Stadium, the numbers tell a different story.  Only once in the 15 year history of GABP have the Reds been in the top half of attendance in the NL.  Between 1985 and 2002, the Reds were in the top half of the NL in total attendance on eight separate occasions.

Why 1985?  It is the second post-Johnny Bench year and the first one where Bench’s influence didn’t permeate the team.  That was the post-Big Red Machine year, as Dan Driessen and Cesar Geronimo both hung on through 1984.  It was the second season of the Reds’ best player between the World Series teams in Dave Parker and yet they still brought the fans into the stadium.

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The Reds need to do something to get the fans back.  And maybe it is something beyond the team on the field that is causing the low attendance.  The team is worthy of more support right now, for now.