Over Father’s Day weekend, America’s national pastime set some notable attendance milestones.
Perhaps the best among them? MLB had 603,303 fans attend Sunday’s 16 games, the highest attendance total on any Sunday since Sept. 28, 2008 (612,669) -- the final full day of that year’s regular season.
Besides record-setting attendance marks, one more trait that June 18, 2023, and Sept. 28, 2008, had in common is that both days had 16 games, specifically due to a Red Sox-Yankees doubleheader occurring on each day. But as for some nuggets more specific to this past weekend, try the following:
MLB drew 1,588,440 fans from Friday-Sunday, an average of 35,299 per game across 45 games played. This was the largest total of fans in a weekend before July since June 16-18, 2017 (1,603,962 fans in 46 games).
In terms of average fans per game, this weekend’s mark of 35,299 was MLB’s highest in a weekend before July since June 24-26, 2016 (35,441 per game).
MLB averaged 37,706 fans per game across Sunday’s action, the highest such number on a Sunday at any point of the regular season since June 15, 2014 (38,174 per game).
And, finally, MLB has had fan attendance totals north of 1.5 million people for two consecutive weekends -- its first time having back-to-back such weekends since August 2017.
And for what it’s worth, the plethora of fans who showed up last weekend got their money’s worth. Sunday’s highlights included the Reds sweeping the defending champion Astros in extra innings, the Giants finishing off their first series sweep in Dodger Stadium in nearly 11 years and Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout hitting back-to-back home runs to take the lead for the Angels in an eventual 5-2 win over the Royals.