New Jersey Jackals attendance has fallen since moving to Hinchliffe. What's being said

PATERSON — Attendance at the New Jersey Jackals' minor league baseball games has plummeted by 45% since they moved to Paterson’s Hinchliffe Stadium from their longtime home on the Montclair State University campus.

After finishing last in the independent Frontier League for attendance in 2022, the team seems on its way to duplicating that dubious achievement. The Jackals are averaging almost 500 fans per game fewer than the Frontier League's next-to-last team in attendance, the Aigles, who play in the Canadian city of Trois-Rivières, halfway between Montreal and Quebec City.

As of June 30, the Jackals were averaging 756 fans per game at Hinchliffe, according to Frontier League statistics.

But five sparsely attended home games later, the attendance figure has dropped to an average of 611 fans at the Jackals' first 26 home games in Paterson, according to league data. Last year, the team drew an average of 1,108 fans to its games at Yogi Berra Stadium in Little Falls.

Attendance has nosedived even as the Jackals are in first place in their division.

It’s not that the attendance drop-off wasn’t expected. Some fans turned trolling the team on its social media platforms into a sport of its own.

“Everyone tried to tell you moving to Paterson was a dumb idea,” one person wrote recently on the Jackals' social media page.

Critics have said Paterson is too far. They've said Paterson isn’t safe. Some have even suggested fireworks would be mistaken for gunshots.

The team’s owner, Al Dorso, recently decided to address the fans' backlash publicly when he gave The New York Times an interview in which he referred to the complainers as “people who live in Montclair and pretend to be woke."

“I regret nothing ever in life,” Dorso said when asked if he still stands by that statement. “It’s only a handful of fans, and I’ve told them personally how I feel.”

Earlier: Yankees surprise young Paterson ballplayers in HOPE Week appearance at Hinchliffe Stadium

Mayor Andre Sayegh, the main cheerleader for the Hinchliffe renovation project and bringing the Jackals to Paterson, remains optimistic.

“It's the first time Paterson has had a professional team, and so there will be an acclimation process,” Sayegh said. “However, we are gearing up for next week's games, and we're also meeting with different community groups to help promote the entertainment value of attending games.”

On May 21, their first home game in Paterson, the Jackals' announced that attendance was 1,500. But to the naked eye, the crowd seemed much sparser than that, with maybe 400 people in the seats, at most.

Eriel Barcenas, a longtime Jackals fan, said the social meda criticism reminded him of when the New Jersey Devils moved to downtown Newark. He said those fears ended up being unfounded.

“I think fans keep forgetting one important thing: The Jackals aren’t affiliated with a major league team,” Barcenas said. “That presents challenges where they have to make decisions that aren’t always popular.”

Dorso told Paterson Press that the front office’s focus has been on getting more locals into the ballpark. Most of the crowd at Hinchliffe is still coming from the suburbs.

“We have to put much more emphasis on the Paterson people,” Dorso said. “Tell them they’re missing some great baseball and a fantastic facility.”

In addition to regular promotions like Thirsty Thursdays, with reduced-priced beer, and partnerships with Chick-fil-A, the stadium has held events like Historic Black College and Universities night and a Juneteenth celebration, where Larry Doby’s Cooperstown plaque was on display.

The team also honored Roberto Clemente — the 12-time Golden Glove winner from Puerto Rico — on June 11, giving attendees a free poster.

Dorso admitted that the team’s marketing has fallen short in reaching the city’s Latino residents, who comprise 62% of Paterson’s population.

“What we’ve not done is outreach to that community,” said Dorso. “We’re not communicating in their language, in their neighborhoods.”

Brian LoPinto, founder of Friends of Hinchliffe Stadium, was at the Clemente tribute and remembered seeing a promising turnout.

“Maybe we should have a Martin Dihigo night,” LoPinto said, referring to the pitcher for the New York Cubans, one of the Negro League teams that played at Hinchliffe in the 1930s.

LoPinto believes the team’s attendance slump is temporary.

“The stadium was closed for 26 years,” he said. “There is a need to reintroduce this venue to people in the neighborhood. We’re still in the get-to-know-you stage.”

Minor league ballparks in distressed cities haven’t had the best track record. The stadiums that once housed the Newark Bears, Bridgeport Bluefish, Camden River Sharks and Atlantic City Surf were either repurposed or demolished. In 2014, on the day of a liquidation sale at Riverfront Stadium in Newark, Bears co-owner Douglas Spiel told a reporter that he blamed the team’s “bad location."

“There’s a resistance to come to the inner city to watch baseball,” he said.

Hinchliffe is designated as a national landmark because of its status as one of two stadiums still standing where Negro League baseball games were played. The stadium fell into disrepair in the 1990s, and officials shut it down.

Hinchliffe reopened this spring as part of a $106 million renovation project that also includes a 75-unit senior citizen apartment building and a 310-space parking garage.

Among Jackals fans, another source of frustration seems to be the cost of parking, which, at $15, is the same price as a ticket. The garage is operated by the Paterson Parking Authority, the mayor said.

“We’re working on it,” Dorso said of the parking fee situation.

Darren Tobia is a contributing writer for Paterson Press.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ Jackals attendance drops since move to Hinchliffe. What's next?