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The Chicago White Sox are preparing for another slow second half of the season for ticket sales at U.S. Cellular Field.
In an annual memo to the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority projecting paid attendance for the remainder of the year, the team said it expects to sell 423,466 tickets between June 1 and the end of the season.
That's about 15,000 fewer tickets than it sold during the same period last season, when it finished with a paid attendance of 1.76 million, the fifth-lowest per-game average in Major League Baseball.
The Sox's stadium rental agreement requires that the team provide a projection every June of their final paid attendance and an estimate of what they'll pay in rent and ticket fees to the agency that owns and operates the stadium.
This year, they expect to finish with a final season ticket sales total of 1.8 million, according to the memo.
If the Sox can pull it off, that would mark the second straight year of higher paid attendance on the South Side. But the team came up well short of where it thought it would be last year, selling about 150,000 fewer tickets than it projectedfor June, July, August and September.
It has been a roller coaster first three months of the season for the Sox, which had their best start in a decade but stumbled back to a .500 record. The early promise during a month when the Sox typically struggle to draw fans didn't provide much of a jolt.
Paid attendance through the first 37 home games is down by 4 percent to 20,723 per game, good for fourth-lowest in baseball.
RENT CALCULATION
Under the rental agreement, the team pays a base rent that goes up incrementally each year at the same rate as the Consumer Price Index. Then it pays ISFA $3 for every ticket it sells between 1.95 million and 2,425,000, and on a graduated pay scale beyond that.
The last time it paid any of those fees was 2010, when the team drew nearly 2.2 million fans. Aside from U.S. Cellular Field's opening season in 1991, the most the Sox have paid in ticket fees is more than $3.5 million in 2006.
Removing the estimated 130,000 tickets that are given away to sponsors or sold for less than $3 apiece, the Sox project final paid attendance for ticket fee purposes will be less than 1.7 million.
That means no ticket fees for the sixth straight season for ISFA, which is due to receive rent of $1,580,784 from the team this season.
That's not ideal for the agency, which pays off the debt obligations associated with the construction and maintenance of U.S. Cellular Field and the 2002 renovation of Soldier Field.
Most of the agency's funding comes from hotel tax revenue, which is on track to be more than enough to cover its debt payments of $38.5 million for its 2017 fiscal year.
The vast majority of that—about $36 million—is tied to Soldier Field debt. But the agency's annual payment for the lakefront stadium is scheduled to gradually balloon in the years ahead, reaching nearly $87 million in 2032.
It has come up short of its debt payments only once since the Soldier Field renovation project was approved in 2001. The agency was forced to tap into the city's share of the state income tax in 2011 to cover a $185,000 shortfall in hotel tax revenue.
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