McCoy Stadium - Attendance

Attendance

When current owner Ben Mondor bought control of the team in 1977, the PawSox drew only 70,354 fans (1,082 per game) to McCoy, which seated 5,800 people at the time. A few seats were added along the way, and during the mid-1990s, the park's capacity was listed as 7,002. However, until the renovated McCoy opened in 1999, it remained the league's smallest park, and even with the expansion, is still right near the bottom. Currently, McCoy's capacity exceeds the stadiums of only two other IL teams (Durham Athletic Park and Charlotte's Knights Stadium), and by only a few dozen seats at that.

In the first season of the expanded McCoy (1999), the PawSox averaged a paid attendance of 8,403 per game, and in 2000 it increased to 8,733. That figure represented 87% of every seat for every game being sold, where no other team in the league was above 70%. The club's top two attendance figures have come in 2004 and 2005, and with a paid attendance of 688,421, the '05 PawSox ranked fourth among all minor-league teams in any sport in North America. In New England, they ranked as the biggest draw of any sporting event except their parent club, the Red Sox at Fenway Park.

Going into the 2006 season, the top 88 single-game attendance figures have come in the past seven years since the expansion. The current record crowd of 11,802 was set on September 5, 2004, for a late-season game against Scranton with the PawSox in playoff contention. (The season finale the next day, at 11,067, ranks 13th.) Prior to the expansion, the notable single-game record occurred on July 1, 1982, when 9,389 showed up for the pitching match-up of Mark Fidrych versus Dave Righetti.