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Indifferent, ambivalent, or succumbed to the home team’s dwindling postseason chances, 31,301 fans paid to visit Oracle Park to see the Giants fall one game further below .500 on Monday night.
Middling results haven’t prevented an attendance resurgence at Third and King this season. With five games remaining, the Giants are set to post their highest attendance numbers since 2018. Their famous sellout streak – a 530-game stretch from 2010-2017 – is long gone, but from a box office perspective, this season was a smashing trend in the right direction.
“It’s been amazing,” manager Bob Melvin said before Monday’s 6-5 loss to the Cardinals. “I mean, it always is here, but this year just felt like next-level.”
The Giants (77-80) aren’t officially eliminated from the playoffs, although their Fangraphs playoff odds dropped near 0% after losing eight of 10 with Monday’s defeat. Yet the club has finally returned attendance to pre-pandemic levels in Buster Posey’s first year as president of baseball operations.
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Since 2021, the Giants have tried to fill the ballpark in various ways. They’ve leaned into nostalgia with frequent reunions and ceremonies celebrating the franchise’s heydays. They’ve lowered some beer prices and upped their promotional giveaway game.
No single factor made sellout crowds the norm again. A combination of marketing, the city recovering from the pandemic, Posey’s presence atop the org chart, and a bigger investment in the roster — particularly in big-name stars — has surely contributed to the revival.
“I think it’s the closest thing to the championship teams in terms of the mix of talent and just the personalities,” Mark Ponte, 49, told The Standard from the left-field bleachers during pregame batting practice. “(Willy) Adames and (Jung) Hoo Lee, they’re charismatic in themselves. We haven’t had people like that since the days of ‘Freak,’ ‘MadBum,’ ‘Cainer.’ It’s been a while since we had people who are not only talented but have personalities we can enjoy from an entertainment standpoint.”
Ponte wore a City Connect jersey and promotional bucket hat as the Giants committed a pair of errors and ran into two more outs against St. Louis. The Giants have sold out 28 games this year, with five more games on the shores of China Basin to add to that total.
The 530-game streak that ended amid a 98-loss season is still the longest in National League history. Posey, Tim Lincecum, and Madison Bumgarner led San Francisco to three World Series titles in five years, generating the golden age of Giants baseball on the West Coast.
Even in the seasons after 2014, the Giants had no problem filling up their waterfront park. That changed in 2019, when San Francisco posted its third straight losing season. Then no team played in front of fans in the shortened 2020 pandemic season.
In 2021, when the Giants won a franchise-record 107 games under manager Gabe Kapler, the club averaged 20,734 fans per home game. There were some state restrictions for crowds in the first half of the season and much of the city was still working remotely, which hurt foot traffic. Plus, even as the team won at a historic rate, some of the fan base didn’t resonate with Kapler’s managerial style.
That season, though, was the only one in the past nine years in which the Giants reached the postseason. Winning is a factor absent from this year’s attendance rebound.
Earlier this summer, the Giants lost 15 of 16 games at Oracle Park across three separate home stands. They sold out five games in that stretch alone – one more than the entire 2021 regular season.
Even with a lighter crowd on Monday, the Giants rank seventh out of 30 MLB teams with an average attendance of 36,060 per home game. That’s nearly 3,000 more fans per night than the 33,429 they averaged in 2019 and the 33,096 last year.
“We feel them late, they’re always engaged,” Melvin said. “It’s been one of the real bright spots this year. Every team that comes in here, the guys that I talk to, the coaches I talk to, they mention that — how electric this place is. Doesn’t matter if it’s Tuesday night, Saturday night, just a great vibe in this ballpark.”
A lack of investment into acquiring stars has been a sore spot for fans in recent years, but not this season. San Francisco’s ninth-ranked payroll is the franchise’s highest since 2021. With a more expensive team comes more continuity in the Giants’ lineup. Fans can expect to see Adames, Lee, Rafael Devers, Matt Chapman, and Heliot Ramos just about every day.
“I think due to the players on the roster and also due to being close to being in the playoffs or not,” said JJ Alcantar, a fan sitting up the third-base line. “We’re on the edge of making it or not. Everyone’s trying to show their support to give that extra push to go into the playoffs.”
In the top of the third inning on Monday night, a fan sitting behind home plate caught a foul ball and handed it to a kid sitting two rows behind him. Moments like that can happen any year, no matter how the team on the field is performing.
No matter the reasons, more Giants fans are experiencing them again this season.