Slump at the Turnstiles

It is cloudy at the beach. It is ladies' day at the golf course. His boat is in drydock, and his wallet won't stand a trip to the track. So what is a restless sports buff to do on a summer afternoon? He could take in a baseball game, but he probably won't. Empty seats are the sign of baseball's times.

Going into the season's second half, eleven of the 20 big-league clubs are in the throes of attendance slumps. Ticket sales are 50,000 off last year's mid-season mark in Houston, 126,998 in Pittsburgh, 245,592 in Atlanta. In San Francisco, paid admissions are already down 277,182 from 1967--a season that was also disastrous at the box office. Total big-league attendance is off almost 6% this year. And it would be far worse except for Detroit, where the Tigers, driving toward their first American League pennant in 23 years, have attracted 173,419 more fans than they had at this time last year.

No Race. What's wrong? Every baseball mogul has a theory. Cincinnati's Robert Howsam blames the weather: "In 22 of our first 26 games we had either rain or the threat of it." Others pick on TV and the unattractiveness of older big-league stadiums, at least two of which--Chicago's Comiskey Park and Philadelphia's Connie Mack Stadium--are located in ghetto areas, which many fans are afraid to traverse at night. The pitchers' domination of the sport and the concurrent decline in hitting (as of last week only eight major-leaguers were batting .300) undoubtedly have had an impact: "Pitching may be 75% of the game," says a San Francisco sportswriter, "but hitting is 75% of the gate." So has the fact that neither league boasts anything resembling a pennant race: the Tigers enjoy a 7 1/2game lead in the American League, and the St. Louis Cardinals top the National League by nine games.

The reasons go deeper. Interest in baseball has been falling off for years as people discover how exciting other sports and forms of leisure activity can be. Compared with the violence and sophistication of pro football, the frenetic pace of hockey and basketball, baseball seems elementary, antiquated and soporific. It still draws more fans in total than other pro team sports. But that is only because there are 1,620 big-league baseball games each season (v. 182 pro-football games). Attendance per game in baseball has actually dropped by 2,639 fans over the past 20 years. Donald Deskins, a social scientist at the University of Michigan, says the big problem is that baseball simply is out of step with the times. "It's too slow," says Deskins. "It's not action-oriented."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.