Delmon Young, Avisail Garcia give Tigers some insurance over Yankees in ALCS Game 1

By Drew SilvaOct 13, 2012, 10:50 PM EDT
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The Tigers’ lead in Game 1 of the ALCS just grew.

Delmon Young launched a solo home run to the left field seats at Yankee Stadium with one out in the top of the eighth, pushing Detroit to a 3-0 advantage over New York with the evening growing increasingly late.

The dinger not only provided insurance for the Tigers in this crucial ALCS opener, it also made Young the all-time postseason home run leader in franchise history. (He overtook the great Craig Monroe).

Jhonny Peralta followed Young’s blast with a double, then scooted home on a single by Avisail Garcia, making the score 4-0.

The Tigers will ask their bullpen to nail down the final six outs. The bottom of the eight just began.

Minor League Baseball had its worst attendance in 14 years

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By Craig CalcaterraSep 24, 2018, 2:22 PM EDT
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Baseball American reports today that total attendance at minor league baseball games reached a 14-year low in 2018. Total attendance was 40,450,337. That’s a drop of 1,382,027 fans compared to last season.

Around a third of that drop is attributable to fewer scheduled games but, as Baseball America notes, even when you go to average attendance per game, there was a sharp drop off this season. BA suggests that this represents a leveling off after over a decade’s worth of large increases in minor league attendance. Which sound pretty plausible. Overall, attendance numbers are still massively above where they were 15-20 years ago, so this seems more like a correction than a real problem. The BA article goes into some good analysis of the decline.

All of that said, revenues are up for the minors, in large part because of merchandise sales and because minor league ballparks have a lot more amenities and better concessions than they used to have and fans are willing to pay for them.