Coca-Cola Park, Allentown (AAA #16 - The best attendance in the minors)

The Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs had the top attendance, both total (588,788) and per game average (8,066), in all of the minor leagues last year. And the year before. Why?

The MLB press release about them having the top attendance for 2024 attributes this to them having been the “Hometown Team” for the region since 2008, and to being “the most affordable family fun entertainment experience in the region.” Many minor league teams could say such vague generalities, but none of the other 119 teams in the minors draw as well as Lehigh Valley, so I’m not satisfied with that explanation.

The Lehigh Valley area (Allentown is the biggest city) is far from the highest population metropolitan area in AAA baseball. In fact, by my count, it’s 21st of the 30. But of the ones without any “major league” (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, WNBA, MSL) teams, Allentown is fourth, behind Norfolk, Louisville, Albuquerque, and Rochester. All of them also draw well by AAA standards, though not as well as Allentown.

It is close (about an hour’s drive) to the parent team, the Philadelphia Phillies. But there are at least four that are closer (Tacoma, St. Paul, Sugar Land, and Gwinnett), and only one of them, St. Paul, finished in the top half of the AAA teams in attendance last year, so that seems to usually be a disadvantage, not an advantage.

I asked the woman sitting next to us, who attends games regularly, why she thought the attendance was so high, and she thought about it and said, “This is just a sports-crazy place – the sports section in the local newspaper is often bigger than the local news section.” Note that at a Lehigh Valley game, unlike at many minor league parks, there’s usually someone sitting next to you.

And she pointed out that the local minor league hockey team draws well, too. That, of course, meant that I had to look up the hockey team, the Lehigh Valley Phantoms. They certainly get decent crowds, but don’t do as well as the IronPigs – they finished 11th in attendance in the 32-team American Hockey League (the top hockey minor league) this past winter.  

Like Scranton-Wilkes Barre, they had numerous ceremonial first pitches, and lots of kids on the field before the game, which probably helps, but it didn’t really seem to help at SWB. Unlike SWB, the crowd responded throughout the game to the various between-inning games, and exhortations to make noise. Also, I commented yesterday on the number of billboards in the outfield at SWB. Lehigh Valley put them to shame. I counted about 70 different advertisements from foul pole to foul pole, though I may have missed a few.

 


I suspect that, as in the case of the majors, this year’s attendance correlates with last year’s attendance, so once you establish a tradition, as in Lehigh Valley, the fans keep coming. But what started it?

I don’t think I’ll figure this one out. Instead, I’ll just remember enjoying the atmosphere at the game.

The game

I should put in a caveat. The crowd was into the game until the IronPigs scored eight runs in the bottom of the 7th inning to turn a close game (4-2) into a rout (they ended up winning 12-3). At that point, the crowd began leaving, so it was much easier to get out of the parking lot at the best-attended minor league stadium than at the best-attended major league stadium (the zoo that is the Dodger Stadium parking lots).

The attendance was 7515, smaller than their average last year, but it was a weekday night. Two things that should have driven attendance up, though. The IronPigs have the best record in all of AAA baseball, and the starting pitcher grew up in the area.

I thought that pitcher, Gabe Mosser, was going to have a short night when he gave up a solid single to the first hitter, and a booming home run to the second. But he gave up only one more hit before he left in the 6th inning. He’s recently been promoted to AAA, and this was definitely his best game yet. 

The first female MLB umpire?

At AAA games, it's not just the players who are hoping for their shot at the majors. The umpires are, too. However, for umpires, once you've made it to the majors, you can stay for many, many years, although instant replay and computerized strike zones are going to make it harder for umpires who lose their stuff. Furthermore, the ladder for umpires is more obvious. Unlike the players, AAA umpires are all competing to move up to the next level -- none of them are on their way down.

Last night, we saw the woman who is almost certain to become the first female major league umpire, Jen Pawol. She has been umpiring at the AAA level since 2023, and is now the crew chief for her umpiring team, and is on the MLB "call-up list," in case a replacement is needed during the season. We hadn't seen her call a AAA game before, but I believe I saw her call a game behind home plate in the Arizona Fall League last year, and it was remarkable.

The AFL is for minor league players who are good prospects to make it to the big leagues in the next couple of seasons, and their parent teams want them to get in some more game time against quality players without having to go to the Caribbean for one of the winter leagues. The games, played in Spring Training stadiums around the Phoenix area, are poorly attended, but highly quality, so I try to get to at least one or two per year. 

In one of the games last year, Jen Pawol was the ump behind the plate. The first hitter walked. I will frequently check the MLB app to see how well the home plate umpire is doing on ball-strike calls, since it shows up there 10 to 30 seconds after the pitch. They even run that during AFL games. The app showed that all four of the pitches she called as balls were actually in the strike zone, though at the very edge. When the pattern continued, with more pitches that the app showed were at the edge of the strike zone getting called as balls, I concluded that either a) they were using the computerized system on the field, but not the same computerized system as the app (I didn't think that was the case) or b) they were not using the challenge system, since I would have expected someone to challenge one of those calls. The next day, I found out that they were using the challenge system in the AFL. That means that while Pawol's strike zone disagreed with the computerized one by a fraction of an inch, it was so consistent (just smaller that the computer's zone by that fraction of an inch on every side) that no one challenged a single call. Given that she'd been working in the challenge system for two years, I suspect that what really happened was that the computerized zone was set up slightly differently than usual (one camera off by a small angle or something), and that she was actually calling the zone the players were used to. 

I think she'll be in the majors soon, and I think she'll be good. 

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