The South Korean baseball league set a new single-season attendance record on Sunday, surpassing a 7-year-old mark with more than a month left on the season.
The Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) announced the attendance for the season reached 8,407,887 as of Sunday afternoon, after all 23,750 tickets were sold out for the evening tilt between the Kia Tigers and the LG Twins at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in Seoul.
The previous record had been 8,400,688 fans from the 2017 season, covering 720 games. The overall figure through Saturday had been 8,384,137, making it only a matter of time before the 2017 record tumbled.
The KBO broke the record on Sunday in its 569th game of the season.
The league announced later that teams finished Sunday with 8,475,664 fans for the season.
The game between the Hanwha Eagles and the SSG Landers in Incheon, just west of Seoul, drew 22,545 fans. In the southeastern city of Busan, the Lotte Giants hosted the Kiwoom Heroes in front of 20,740 fans. The NC Dinos and the Samsung Lio
ns played before 12,328 fans in Changwon, just west of Busan.
In Suwon, south of the capital city, the KT Wiz and the Doosan Bears played with 12,164 fans at KT Wiz Park.
The Tigers-Twins game was also the 161st sellout this season, already an all-time record.
The league has been on a record-breaking pace since the start of this season, while multiple clubs have broken their sellout records.
The Hanwha Eagles enjoyed a 17-game sellout streak earlier in the year and have played 41 of their 60 home games in front of a packed house.
The KBO drew more than 6 million fans before the All-Star break for the first time this year and surpassed the 7-million mark on July 27, the earliest point in a season to do so by more than a month.
For the first time in the KBO’s 42-year history, every club is averaging over 10,000 fans per home game, led by the LG Twins with nearly 19,400.
Since the league expanded to 10 teams in 2015, the record for most clubs with a million fans is four. This year, three teams — the Twin
s, the Doosan Bears and the Samsung Lions — have already surpassed the million mark, with the Tigers, the SSG Landers and the Lotte Giants also closing in on that milestone.
Despite the league’s earlier concerns, rainy weather and the heat wave of the July-August period have not had any adverse effect on ticket sales.
The KBO teams averaged 14,832 fans in July, virtually on par with May, and the number had ticked up to 15,852 fans through Saturday in August, which would be the highest monthly average for this season if it holds up for another two weeks.
Source: Yonhap News Agency