The 2022 Dodgers were the best team in baseball in the regular season, and when you combine that with a fanbase that showed up in droves even when Frank McCourt was driving the team to bankruptcy and Rupert Murdoch was trading Hall of Famers instead of paying them, the attendance this season at Dodger Stadium was pretty impressive.
All in all, in 81 home dates, the Dodgers drew a total attendance of 3,861,408. That's a big number no matter how you look at it — 47,672 per game, which is more than 24 MLB stadiums can even hold.
One of the few stadiums that could hold that many — in fact, the only one that could hold more than Dodger Stadium — is the Oakland Coliseum, which has a maximum capacity of 56,782 compared to L.A.'s 56,000.
But the 2022 A's ... well, let's just say they didn't draw well this year.
Bill is actually understating things here. The actual gap was 3,073,506. The A's averaged 9,727 fans per game, which means they would have needed about 7.6 more home games just to cut the attendance gap between them and the Dodgers down to 3 million.
The 2021 and 2022 seasons are the worst years for attendance in Oakland since the 1979 A's los 108 games and finished in seventh place in the seven-team AL West. Oakland management signaled a rough season early, trading almost everyone with any value last offseason and then shipping off the few they missed at the trade deadline. They drew more than 20,000 fans just five times this year, over 30,000 three times, and over 40,000 exactly once.
The Dodgers, meanwhile, posted their worst-attended game on May 18, a Wednesday night game against the DBacks that only drew 35,643. It was one of just nine games that failed to reach 40,000, and they reached 50,000 in over 43 percent of their home games.
And the Dodgers rewarded their fans for showing up.
Congratulations to the Dodgers on another excellent season, and congratulations to Dodger fans for continuing to be the best in baseball!
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