2007 Attendance

Rumors of NPB's demise have been greatly exaggerated by the English speaking press. And to emphasize this point, just have a look at the Pacific League 2007 attendance figures:

Team        Games Attendance   Avg.   Diff
SoftBank      72   2,307,160  32,044  13.2%
Nippon Ham    72   1,833,054  25,459  14.3%
Lotte         72   1,558,430  21,645  15.5%
Orix          72   1,137,186  15,794 -18.2%
Rakuten       72   1,117,369  15,519  17.4%
Seibu         72   1,093,471  15,187  -8.6%
Total        432   9,046,670  20,941   6.1%

All six PL teams surpassed the 1 million mark, SoftBank continuing to out do themselves year after year. For the past three years (and to see where the "Diff" column came from), please see this Google spreadsheet.

Of note, one factor in the increase in overall attendance in the Pacific League was an increase in the number of games from 68 games at home to 72. Still, the average attendance did have a very slight increase.

The Central League went from 73 home games to 72, yet also had an increase in overall attendance as shown here:

Team     Games  Attendance   Avg.   Diff
Hanshin    72    3,144,180  43,669  -0.3%
Giants     72    2,911,358  40,436   0.6%
Chunichi   72    2,390,532  33,202  -0.3%
Yakult     72    1,333,231  18,517   1.4%
Yokohama   72    1,231,997  17,111  11.3%
Hiroshima  72    1,129,061  15,681  11.8%
Total     432   12,140,359  28,103   2.2%

The three year historical record can be found on this Google spreadsheet.

The only way Hanshin can increase attendance is to abandon going out to the rural stadiums during the season. It will be interesting to see how they draw at Kobe and Osaka Dome next season while Koshien gets a face lift.

Chunichi tried to skew the attendance numbers by scheduling more rural sites during inter-league play (to show how much inter-league hurts them), but didn't really have that noticeable of a difference overall from 2006.

I've thought about extending the historical attendance spreadsheets to before 2005, but as we all know, those figures don't mean anything as they were very skewed estimates.