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What happened on this date in baseball history?

Aug 25, 1983: 1st to draw a million

Submitted by BTGrimes on Sun, 08/26/2012 - 4:50am

A Million Can't Be Wrong

3rd base gif LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY • The Louisville Redbirds became the first minor league baseball team in history to draw more than a million fans on this date in 1983. Louisville, the St. Louis Cardinals' triple-A team, reached 1,006,103 with a crowd of more than 31,000. Not long before that, a million in attendance was considered good for a major league team. Louisivlle outdrew three major league teams in '83 - the Cleveland Indians (768,941), Seattle Mariners (813,537) and Minnesota Twins (858,939).

It's been during more recent years however, that minor league baseball has experienced a renaissance. According milb.com, the official website of minor league baseball, minor league baseball draws more fans than the NBA or the NFL.

An attendance record of 39,887,755 total fans was set in 2004, breaking the old record of 39,640,443 set in 1949, even though there are fewer teams today than there were back then. The record was broken in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 when it reached 43.2 million. Attendance has slipped the last few years, but was still well over 41 million in 2011.

[Minor league baseball does not include the attendance figures of numerous independent leagues around the country that are not associated with major league teams.]

Sources:
Minor League Baseball attendance -http://numbertamer.com/files/2011_Minor_League_Analysis.pdf

Major League attendance
The Hardball Times

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The closest minor league

Submitted by MattR (not verified) on Tue, 08/25/2009 - 12:31pm.

The closest minor league cities for me are Tucson (4 hours away), Albuquerque (5 hours away), and Las Vegas (6 hours away). I really miss being able to go to a minor league game. Before Phoenix got the Diamondbacks, I probably went to ten AAA games a year. I visit Phoenix once every six weeks or so, but all it has are the Diamondbacks (expensive) and the Arizona Fall League. Oh well--maybe a yearly trip to one of those other cities is in order.