A's Attendance Figures from Big League Weekend in Las Vegas

The Athletics completed two games for Big League Weekend in Las Vegas on Saturday and Sunday, facing the Arizona Diamondbacks each day. The series ended up being split, one game apiece.

The A's has been hard at work to make a number of positive headlines heading into the weekend, including the extension to Lawrence Butler, announcing a new president in Marc Badain, and a brand new sponsorship with LVCVA that puts a Las Vegas patch on the team's uniforms beginning in 2025.

Given that the patch is meant to signify a promise from the team that they are in fact headed to Las Vegas, the attendance for the weekend series should have been through the roof. While the weekend was announced as a sellout, sports teams like to fudge those numbers, and in looking at just the announced attendance for Big League Weekend the past three years, the numbers haven't moved a whole lot.

"That's because they're all selling out, dummy." If that's the case, then why have the numbers not been exactly the same each and every year? Back in 2023 when the A's played the Reds, they drew a total of 16,829 announced fans. This was right before the team would announce their intentions to leave Oakland for Vegas.

The following year, the attendance actually rose by a bit, finishing at 17,280 for the weekend, while topping out at 9,342 in the second game. The first game, on a Friday, drew 7,938.

This weekend, facing the Arizona Diamondbacks, they finished with nine more total fans that they had in 2023, topping out at 8,708 in Saturday's contest.

What this tells us is that there is room to fit more fans into the ballpark, but the enthusiasm hasn't been there locally for this team. This is also what a lot of skeptics have said all along, that the Vegas baseball fans would prefer an expansion team, rather than another franchise from Oakland. The numbers seem to support this argument.

According to the Las Vegas Aviators' website, the capacity of the park is 8,196, so in that regard, the team has completely sold out in three of the six games played at the venue, with most of those games coming within a few hundred fans. Three of those games have also gone over the listed capacity of seats, meaning standing room tickets have been on the table for purchase.

According to the architect's site, the ballpark can hold as many as 10,000 fans when you include standing room only. It also feels important to point out that Las Vegas Ballpark has a record attendance of 12,111 when they faced Tacoma in 2019, and they have surpassed 11,000 attendees at least five times in the ballpark's history.

The local fans aren't packing the ballpark the A's currently make appearances in to the brim, and the total figure actually dropped by 442 fans year over year. That's not a huge drop-off by any means, but with the club expecting 30 years of sellout crowds in order to make good on the money they're receiving in public financing, it's certainly not the best sign, either.