WSB Chris has a great post about those folks who are filling up Miller Park these days:
Two really good points here. First, if the Brewers are going to keep that $70MM payroll (or more), that relies on a whole bunch of folks showing up for games. Milwaukee has always been a better baseball market that the metro population would suggest, but I'm quite sure there are 50,000 hardcore, long-time Brewers fans available to fill the house every Tuesday night.
Second, I think all of us can attest to this at some level: baseball fandom (or team fandom) has a sort of snowball effect. The more you put in, you more you care, the more you get out of it. (Unless you watch yesterday's game on repeat.) The folks who head out to the game on a lark may not even know who Corey Hart is, but they are that much more likely to check out the boxscore in the paper the next few days. They might even start talking to the guy in the office who won't shut up about his fantasy team.
You don't go from disappointing attendance figures to kick-ass numbers in a couple of years without a broad range of people showing up for the first time. I hope that, when the Brewers are in the 2010 World Series, some of the newcomers now have season tickets, wearing their vintage Pilots gear, and impressing their friends with Ted Simmons trivia.