With a score of 4-8, the Milwaukee Brewers lost their home opener Monday to the St. Louis Cardinals at Miller Park before a crowd of 45,393.
Before the game, the principal owner of the Brewers indicated how many fans are needed this year for the team to break even financially.
The Brewers added several high-quality players in the offseason, pushing their payroll to roughly $90 million. That’s about 30 percent higher than last year, when they drew 2.6 million fans to Miller Park.
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Principal owner Mark Attanasio says the team is budgeting to draw 2.7 million, but downplays the need to break even financially.
“You know we don’t hang on those kind of numbers, the same way I don’t like to hang on payroll numbers. We want to provide a quality entertainment product here, starting with the team on the field,” Attanasio told a morning news conference.
Attanasio said the Brewers are prepared, as always, to lose money, but he won’t say how much.
On the other hand, it appears the team could earn a substantial profit if they draw 3 million fans, as they’ve done three times before in the last decade. That’s when they were heading or appeared to be heading for the playoffs.
Brewers General Manager David Stearns says the Brewers payroll is still well below that of some other Major League Baseball teams. He said the Brewers could spend more this year, but are trying to build a consistent winning team.
“This is a longer-term strategy. Our core focus is to create a team and an organization that can compete consistently in this division — a very well run division — in certain cases, a very well financed division. We want to be competitive in this division year in and year out, and so to some extent, discipline and maybe restraint does come into play there,” Stearns said.
The Brewers play in the National League’s Central Division. The Chicago Cubs or the St. Louis Cardinals have won the division the last five years. The Cubs current payroll is $183 million. The Cardinals are at $160 million.
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