This is a site about Pro Yakyu (Japanese Baseball), not about who the next player to go over to MLB is. It's a community of Pro Yakyu fans who have come together to share their knowledge and opinions with the world. It's a place to follow teams and individuals playing baseball in Japan (and Asia), and to learn about Japanese (and Asian) culture through baseball.
It is my sincere hope that once you learn a bit about what we're about here that you will join the community of contributors.
Michael Westbay
(aka westbaystars)
Founder
Of note, one factor in the increase in overall attendance in the Pacific League was an increase in the number of games from 68 games at home to 72. Still, the average attendance did have a very slight increase.
The Central League went from 73 home games to 72, yet also had an increase in overall attendance as shown here: The three year historical record can be found on this Google spreadsheet.
The only way Hanshin can increase attendance is to abandon going out to the rural stadiums during the season. It will be interesting to see how they draw at Kobe and Osaka Dome next season while Koshien gets a face lift.
Chunichi tried to skew the attendance numbers by scheduling more rural sites during inter-league play (to show how much inter-league hurts them), but didn't really have that noticeable of a difference overall from 2006.
I've thought about extending the historical attendance spreadsheets to before 2005, but as we all know, those figures don't mean anything as they were very skewed estimates.