Dave Smolnycki does it for the game of baseball. When he takes his seat in Section 204, Row 8 on Thursday he’ll be in attendance for the 45th-consecutive Syracuse Chiefs home opener.

“I know nowadays, you need all the fancy stuff with the entertainment, but to me, it’s always been the game itself,” he said.

But the number of fans like Smolnycki is steadily decreasing.

Minor league baseball teams are having to rely on entertainment and promotions to bring fans out to the ballpark. As the Chiefs are set to have their home opener at NBT Bank Stadium on Thursday, the club will look to rebound from a season in which it placed last in the International League in attendance. But now second-year general manager Jason Smorol is confident that there’s a turnaround coming up.

Smorol came to the Chiefs — the Triple-A affiliate of the Washington Nationals — with more than a decade’s worth of minor league baseball experience. When he took over in October 2013, Smorol had the mentality of being all about the fans and being “more minor league-y.”

“I just came in with my philosophy,” Smorol said. “I don’t know that that’s any different than someone else’s philosophy, it’s just what I was taught to do in baseball and that is to be about the fans.”

Despite extensive efforts to try and bring fans to the 11,117-seat ballpark, the Chiefs finished last in both total and average attendance in the International League in 2014. The paid total of 247,046 was the lowest in the history of the Chiefs’ ballpark, which opened in 1997 and is now called NBT Bank Stadium after two name changes.

Smorol said that while the club announced a more than 100,000-person decrease in attendance from 2013, concession sales were up and there were actually more people physically in the ballpark than in previous years—during which attendance tracking wasn’t as accurately portrayed, said Benjamin Hill, who covers minor league baseball for MiLB.com.

Smorol took over as general manager following 44 years of either Tex or John Simone running the ball club and said the Chiefs are still essentially starting a brand-new franchise from scratch. It was often the case where fans could go to a local grocery store or bank and get free Chiefs tickets. Smorol said no more — there were no free tickets last year, except for the city of Syracuse buying out the July 4 game.

“Our product has value,” he said. “So we established that value of $12, $10, $5 a ticket and then more people came last year.”

To generate that value and build some buzz, the Chiefs held promotions such as Deport Justin Bieber Night, Boy Band Night and Tattoo Night to go along with the classics of Fireworks Night and Giveaway Saturdays.

Promotions are more important in minor league baseball than in the major sports because in minor league baseball the average fan is not a fan of the team, Hill said.

The most effective promotions, Hill said, are ones that don’t have to be explained, such as fireworks. The Chiefs currently have 20 fireworks shows planned for this year, compared to 13 last year.

“Owning a ball club is like owning a restaurant with live entertainment,” said Lloyd Johnson, editor of the Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball.

The club is continuing to try and improve attendance through promotions, adjusting to what’s popular — such as selling beer for $2 on Thursdays.

Promotions aren’t the only factor that goes into attendance, but also the weather. During 2014 Chiefs home games, about 2,300 fewer fans on average came to the ballpark when there was precipitation.

In 2010, Stephen Strasburg made four starts for the Chiefs at then-named Alliance Bank Stadium. Strasburg was the consensus No. 1 prospect in baseball and a former No. 1 overall draft pick. Smolnycki described the ballpark as “jam-packed” and “bedlam.”

“It just was a whole different atmosphere,” he said. “People were into the game.”

In Strasburg’s four starts in Syracuse, the Chiefs averaged 5,678 more people per game than their average attendance for 2010.

But having Strasburg, and eventually top prospect Bryce Harper in 2011, come to Syracuse was “lightning in a bottle.”

“There’s just really not enough baseball fandom intensity in the minors for top prospects to get that kind of attention, unless they’re true outliers like Strasburg or Harper,” Hill said.

Right-handed pitcher A.J. Cole is the Chiefs’ highest-rated prospect to start the season, coming in at No. 30 on the Baseball Prospectus Top 101 Prospects list. He’s the only current Chief on the list.

Even without a top prospect, sometimes a winning team isn’t enough automatically help boost attendance.

The Chiefs won the International League North Division last year by two and a half games, but still finished last in attendance for the entire league. In 47 of their 66 home games, they had the higher winning percentage of the two teams going in.

Marshall Adesman, a former general manager for the Waterloo Indians, said winning is the best promotion, but is not necessary to have good attendance. The Chiefs largest total attendance for a season, 1999, came in a year when the team finished two games above .500.

There are many factors that go into attendance, both for the Chiefs and minor league baseball as a whole. What Smorol and other managers can do is “control the controllables.”

While Chiefs management can’t control the weather, the on-field performance or the roster, they can control the fan experience.

“We want to really engage our fans and we want them to have fun,” Smorol said. “Again, that’s what it’s all about — just the fans having fun, wanting to come to the ballpark, spend some time with their families, spend some time with their friends and by the way, there’s a really good baseball game going on.”

Published on April 13, 2015 at 11:20 pm

Contact Justin: jmatting@syr.edu | @jmattingly306