The 2026 regular season marked the fourth straight year that Major League Baseball has seen overall attendance rise. As Sports Business Journal noted at the end of September – coinciding with the end of the regular season itself – MLB teams averaged 29,601 fans per game through their 2,429 games, a mark that was up a half-percent year over year from 2025.
The Reds, though, saw their average attendance decline some 8.1% in one of the worst year over year declines, and at 24,589 per game they failed
to top 2,000,000 million fans at all during 2026.
There are endless theories as to why the Reds stepped backwards. The obvious one is that they went from a team chasing a playoff spot (and eventually waltzing into it) to a team that collapsed early. There’s also the notion that ‘Reds Country’ is an expanse that depends upon the smaller metro areas an hour, two hours away that watch and listen and show up when the goings are good but ditch the idea of a six, or seven hour round trip to catch meaningless weekday games in August and September.
One place firmly entrenched within Reds country still perpetually finds a way to get in front of some incredibly sound baseball, however. Perhaps it’s the idea that the future of the Reds hasn’t yet been spoiled that draws them out on the regular, or perhaps it’s just that the minor league game that is played in their brilliant stadium is just simply a better overall product than what the Castellinis put on the field in Great American Ball Park year after year after year.
That, of course, is up the road in Dayton. Their Dragons drew in over 511,000 fans across the home slate of their regular season, and as Baseball America noted today that was the fourth most of any minor league club across the sport during the 2026 season.
While that’s overly impressive in its own right, context is key here. Ranking in spots one through three on this list are all AAA clubs with significantly larger home stadiums, while only the Richmond Flying Squirrels (of the AA Eastern League and ranking seventh) join the Dragons as non-AAA clubs within the Top 10 in attendance overall.
And Richmond, you may recall, is a city that hosted AAA baseball for nearly 35 years before the Richmond Braves relocated to Gwinnett, Georgia.
It rarely matters how good the Dragons are to draw out their fans, either. Back in 2011 they famously broke the record for the most consecutive home game sellouts by a pro sports club y packing Day Air Ballpark for the 815th consecutive time, and the 2026 iteration of the Dragons only posted a 67-63 overall record. In other words, it’s not the winning that matters so much to the Dayton fans, it’s the baseball itself, especially since in the Midwest League they’re often viewing insanely talented prospects (such as Alfredo Duno for the first half of 2026) playing alongside and against 19 and 20 year olds who are about as un-finished as professionals as it gets.
Props to Dayton and Dragons fans for another year of incredible partnership. Maybe they can give the Reds themselves a few pointers!
