The Chattanooga Lookouts are the Southern League’s North Division first-half champions and are outdrawing last season’s team at the AT&T Field turnstiles with Monday night’s Independence Day celebration contest looming against the Tennessee Smokies.
These are good times for Lookouts managing partner Jason Freier, but many more good times are needed to overcome the impact the coronavirus outbreak had on minor league baseball. Freier is the chairman and CEO of Hardball Capital, which oversees operations of the Lookouts, the Fort Wayne (Indiana) TinCaps and the Columbia (South Carolina) Fireflies.
“Recovering fully economically and being in the same position that we would have been if COVID didn’t happen — it probably is a decade,” Freier said during an interview earlier this season at AT&T Field. “If you think about it, we went about 21 months without a game across the three ballparks. We have about 80 employees, and we never laid anybody off.
“It was really important to us to keep the team together, because we knew at some point there was going to be a light at the end of the tunnel, but we basically ran a business for two years without any revenue coming in, and that’s a challenge.”
The coronavirus wiped out the entire 2020 minor league baseball season, with The Associated Press reporting that teams on average lost more than 91% of their revenue compared to pre-pandemic levels. Several teams opened their stadiums for socially distanced movies and socially distanced camps to provide limited revenue streams that year, and merchandise options remained through most of the gift shops.
Minor league baseball teams lost a combined $800 million in revenue in 2020, according to Sportico, and the 2021 season had a delayed start with 20 fewer games and limited stadium capacities for most of that year. The Lookouts played their first three homestands in 2021 with just 40% capacity, which resulted in crowds capped around 2,500 at their 6,340-seat facility.
Freier said the capacity limitations of 2021 occasionally resulted in fewer concession stands and longer lines, thus lessening the fan experience.
All those days are fortunately in the rearview mirror, and the Lookouts have thrived this season with 135,720 fans through their first 35 home games for an average of 3,877 fans per contest. Through the first 35 home games last season, the first since the pandemic without any restrictions, the Lookouts had amassed 126,069 spectators for an average of 3,602.
Yet having three empty stadiums won’t be an image Freier will be able to erase any time soon.
“We’re on the other side of that now,” he said. “We’re in good shape, and we will get back to where we were over time. There are a lot of people who lost more than money during the pandemic, and we’re acutely aware of that.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.