The Mariners Should Be Worried…

By Blaidd Drwg

And not about the team on the field, we already knew that product wouldn’t be particularly good. The attendance is what they should worry about. In the 6 game home stand the M’s just completed, they drew 138,127 fans, which is an average of 23,000 per game – not great, but not terrible for April when attendance tends to be lower. That number is deceiving, especially when you consider that more than half of those fans were at 2 games – the home opener (45,000) and the second game which was an Ichiro Felix Bobble Head night (30,000).

They managed to draw 21,000 to Kids Opening Day on Sunday (it seemed like a lot less than that), 13,000 to Felix’s first start of the season and 12,400 to the last game of the series against the Jays, a new all-time low attendance figure for Safeco field. The really sad thing is that the game Felix started also broke the record for the lowest attendance at Safeco field. I am also shocked to see that the attendance for the bobble head night was only 30k – it is usually closer to 40K.

This is a team with a nearly 90 million dollar payroll that has a handful of players worth watching, so the lack of people coming to the games is really not all that surprising. There has been a noticeable downward trend in attendance for years for the M’s and I think this might be the year they fail to break 2 million for the first time since Safeco opened. To make matters worse, with all the talk of a “youth movement” for the Mariners, their hitters have an average age of 31.3, which makes them older than every team in the AL except the Yankees (the league average is 29.5 years old). They do much better with an average pitcher age of 27.5, good for the 5th youngest in the AL, but outside of Felix and Pineda, are any of the “young” pitchers on this team really guys you see being Mariners in 3 years?