Amid drop in attendance, here’s how Hens are trying to recapture their mojo

It was so fresh and exciting, a baseball honeymoon booked without a return ticket.

Fifth Third Field opened in 2002 to wonderstruck reviews — Newsweek named it the best stadium in the minors that very first year — and the fans just kept pouring in, shattering all expectations.

Consider: There are 30 Triple-A teams, and only the Scranton/​Wilkes-Barre RailRiders play in a smaller metro area than Toledo. The Mud Hens still drew at least 500,000 spectators in each of their first 16 seasons downtown — a threshold that, for context, nine teams in all of minor league sports reached last year.

The ballpark was our field of dreams.

Well …

Finally, reality has intervened.

That’s not to suggest there is a problem.

Mud Hens fans haven’t flown the coop.

By any relative measure, business is good. Fifth Third Field remains the place to be come summer, with Nielsen research telling us that 30 percent of adults in greater Toledo attend a Hens game in a given year — a market share surpassed locally only by the Toledo Zoo.

But, naturally, the novelty is not what it once was.

Attendance dropped below the half-million mark in 2019 for the first time (481,496) and has fallen further since the pandemic. Even with the Triple-A season expanding from 144 to 150 games, the Hens drew 426,499 and 447,384 fans the past two seasons, respectively.

I met this week with the club’s longtime leaders — president and CEO Joe Napoli and general manager Erik Ibsen — about what comes next.

Are the Hens headed down the same road as the Indians-turned-Guardians, who enjoyed a roaring new-stadium honeymoon of their own (455 straight sellouts!), followed by an irreversible spiral in demand?

Or can they sustain — and recapture — their mojo?

The safe money is on the latter.

We’ll explain why in a minute, but, before looking ahead, it is helpful to take a step back.

Believe it or not, if you rewind to the opening of Fifth Third Field, there was a real concern that the $39 million park was built too big.

Sure, the Hens had an iconic brand. (Think about their place in pop culture. Crankshaft from the comics and Montgomery Brewster from Brewster’s Millions pitched for them, Indians skipper Lou Brown from Major League managed them, and Jamie Farr’s Corporal Klinger from M*A*S*H famously rooted for them. Travel anywhere, and even casual sports fans know the Mud Hens.)

But, they had an iconic brand at Ned Skeldon Stadium, too, and nobody came. There was no guarantee the club would prosper in a downtown neighborhood that not long ago had been cobwebbed with shuttered storefronts and old warehouses.

In the Hens’ final dozen seasons in Maumee, their annual attendance ranged from 159,009 (2,208 fans per game) to 325,532 (4,859). They projected a bump to 425,000 to 435,000 fans in the new park.

“We wanted 7,500 seats,” Napoli said. “We had to do almost 9,000, and the International League wanted us to do 10. That was the rule. We said, ‘That’s too many seats for a market our size.’ They said, ‘Well, you have to be at 10, and we’ve got to hold you to that because he held everyone else to that number.’

“So, we got creative. We ended up with 8,943 seats, with picnic tables and standing room taking us above 10.”

Of course, it turned out beautifully.

The stadium became a downtown catalyst and our civic hub of summer. Fans filled the park in the thrilling early years and kept coming in the lean middle ones, the party — as is the idea in the minors — transcending the baseball. (Amid eight straight losing seasons from 2010-17, the Hens never drew less than 530,000 fans.)

In fact, they’re still coming.

Some context on the current numbers: A big reason for the smaller crowds is a sharp decline in group sales since the pandemic. Think boy scout troops and Little League teams and company picnics. The Hens could count on them buying 150,000-170,000 tickets. That business is just now picking up again, with the club moving 100,000 group tickets last season and projecting to sell about 130,000 this year.

More perspective: Even averaging 6,214 fans per game last season — a number that should tick up this year — the Hens ranked 16th in the minors. (The Lehigh Valley IronPigs averaged 7,990 fans to lead the way.)

Still, clearly, the early glow has faded.

The Hens want to return to the half-million mark — “the sweet spot,” Ibsen said — and are busy brainstorming ideas to reimagine and freshen the ballpark experience.

I saw tentative renderings of some of the updates we can expect to see by 2026 and came away impressed.

Broadly, the goal is to re-energize the Hensville entertainment district outside the stadium and bring the ballpark in line with industry trends, which is to say there will be fewer seats and more social areas.

Look, for instance, for the seats in Section 101 down the left-field line to be torn out and replaced with drink rails and table tops, and a new bar to back the standing-room setting. (If you’ve been to Progressive Field in Cleveland — where the Guardians reduced capacity from about 43,000 seats to 35,000 — picture a downsized version of the District in right field.) The right-field bar area area under the Roost will be redesigned, too.

“We’re focused on these corners first,” Ibsen said.

Once the makeover is complete, by the way, Napoli said Fifth Third Field will have about ... 7,500 seats.

Right where the Hens hoped to be from the start.

Can they recapture a little of that early magic, too? Napoli and his team embrace the challenge.

“We are stewards of something that is bigger than ourselves,” he said. “We’ve been given that caretaker’s role, and we try to live it. That’s what keeps you going.

“Every generation changes. Expectations change. And it’s fun to be part of the creativity. … Who gets to say they get to work every day and your job is to create a memorable experience for someone else? Who gets to do that? Erik and I would tell you we can’t believe we get to call this our job.”

Contact David Briggs at dbriggs@theblade.com or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.