The Twins sold 3,223,640 tickets with a 94-win team in their first season in Target Field in 2010. The masses returned and the Twins sold 3,168,107 tickets with a 63-win team in 2011.
There is nothing more off-putting in major professional sports than a bad baseball team. If you're a sports consumer, the futility is in your face for 6.23 games per week for 26 weeks.
Even in new ballparks, honeymoons don't last for bad baseball teams, particularly in a market with such spotty support for its ballclub as this one.
The Twins won 66 games in 2012 and the tickets sold fell to 2,776,354. They won 66 again in 2013 and fell to 2,447,644. They won 70 in 2014 and fell to 2,250,606.
Season tickets were dropping by 3,000 to 4,000 per year and had fallen into the 13,000s for 2015. Forecasts were for another 90-loss season and another precipitous drop in attendance.
And then the Twins rallied from a poor start with a 20-7 record in May and stayed in the wild-card race until the last weekend. There was also excitement created with the arrival of Miguel Sano, the ballyhooed power hitter.
This time, with an 83-79 record in Paul Molitor's first season as manager, the attendance drop leveled off at 2,220,054. When you consider there was a drop of 300,000 individual tickets attached to season sales, many more people bought tickets to the Twins last summer than in the prior year.
There was enough optimism over the winter to end the annual fall in season tickets. There was also enough skepticism that positive reports from spring training (some authored here) were not greeted with universal approval by the team's followers.