Charlotte Knights take aim at another attendance title

Ask Charlotte Knights’ Chief Operating Officer Dan Rajkowski about winning the minor league attendance race, and he goes straight to Ricky Bobby and “Talladega Nights.”

“If you ain’t first, you’re last,” Rajkowski said Tuesday morning, as Knights employees hustled around the lower level of BB&T Ballpark, preparing for the team’s season opener Thursday night.

“I don’t like not winning the attendance title,” Rajkowski said. “The staff knows it. And they don’t like losing either.”

The race to draw the most fans in minor league baseball resumes at 7:04 p.m. Thursday, when the Knights begin play at the uptown park against the Durham Bulls.

Rajkowski had a happy winter. The Knights drew 619,639 fans last season. That was 517 more than fellow International League member Indianapolis, and it gave Charlotte the attendance championship. The Knights also were attendance champions in their first three seasons at BB&T Ballpark – 2014 through 2016.

They were displaced in 2017 by Indianapolis.

“That didn’t make me happy,” Rajkowski said.

But Charlotte’s average per-game attendance of 8,980 in 69 dates led the way last year.

Rajkowski says the Knights have developed a loyal base of fans, and he says relatively low prices for tickets and concessions and the attractiveness of the stadium – which has been ranked by some analysts as the best in the minors – help keep attendance strong.

The Knights have played 350 home games since the uptown ballpark opened. Of those, 113 were sellouts. There were 23 sellouts last season and more than a dozen games that nearly sold out.

But, Rajkowski said, the sales pitch continues.

“This is a city where new people move in every day,” he said. “A lot of those people are moving into the uptown area or close by. A lot of them work uptown. They see the stadium, and we’re trying to convince them to give us a try.”

Rajkowski said he believes some would-be fans were concerned when the stadium opened in 2014 that uptown parking would be a problem. “I think we’ve gotten past that now,” he says. “Fans who have come down here realize we have a lot of parking, and it’s not expensive.”

He said there are three key factors in drawing fans – winning, weather and promotions.

“Two of those three, I have no control over,” said Rajkowski, whose Class AAA team has been part of the Chicago White Sox organization for 20 years and has little control over player assignments. “So I work on the promotions.

“We try to insure that fans have a great time when they’re here,” he says. “We conduct surveys all the time, and believe me, I read every comment.”

Durham Bulls at Charlotte

BB&T Ballpark

7:04 p.m., Thursday

This story was originally published April 3, 2019 at 6:17 PM.