Jordan Leaves Barons With Empty Stands

Life after Michael Jordan isn’t all that the Southern League had hoped for.

A record 2.6 million fans streamed into minor league stadiums from Alabama to the Carolinas last year as America’s most marketable athlete tried his hand at baseball with the Birmingham Barons.

Kids in Chicago Bulls jerseys were everywhere, and the media was, too. If you wanted a freebie on fielder’s glove night you had to be there when the gates opened.

No one expected all those firsttime fans to come back this year after Jordan returned to the NBA. The aim was simply to retain a good portion of the people who paid homage to His Airness.

So far, the results have been mixed.

Not only is Southern League attendance well below 1994 levels, the numbers are down slightly from 1993.

Gate admissions totaled 733,925 for the first two months of the season, a 2 percent decline from two years earlier. More games were played this year than in ‘93, so pergame attendance was down even more, 11 percent.

League president Arnold Fielkow said bad weather and lingering fan anger over the major league strike have combined to wipe out the attendance boost many clubs hoped for in the post-Jordan era.

“Michael Jordan’s effect was that he exposed new people to the league,” Fielkow said from league headquarters in suburban Atlanta. “I think over the summer we will see the numbers pick up.”

The decline in fans is perhaps most noticeable at Hoover Metropolitan Stadium, where Jordan spent his one and only season with the Barons, the Chicago White Sox’s Double-A affiliate.

On most nights, there’s plenty of room in the same blue bleachers that were crowded with fans last year. The children can still get those free gloves long after the first pitch is thrown.

Barons president Bill Hardekopf said there’s been some mental adjustments for team employees used to seeing big crowds almost every night. By comparison, this year seems a little disappointing.

But Hardekopf isn’t pushing the panic button, even though attendance for the first half of the season was 117,872 - down from 123,053 in ‘93 and 205,012 last year.

An average of 3,572 people have attended each Barons home game this year, compared to 3,845 in 1993 and a whopping 6,213 during the year of Michael, whose picture is plastered all over this year’s promotional materials.

“I still think we can have a good increase over ‘93 this year,” Hardekopf said.