NORTH LITTLE ROCK — Several factors coincided to make Tuesday night’s crowd one of the largest Arkansas has played in front of at Dickey-Stephens Park.

The storms that hammered the northwest corner of the state stayed away, the Razorbacks are one of the hottest teams in the country with back-to-back sweeps of top-25 teams and interest in Arkansas baseball is at an all-time high after coming within one strike of winning a national championship last season.

That led to a packed house watching Arkansas crush Grambling State 17-3 in its final midweek game of the season, as 10,463 tickets were distributed and 9,758 were scanned.

Even though the paid attendance was 50 shy of breaking the record set back in 2012, head coach Dave Van Horn said after the game he wasn’t sure how they’d fit more people in the park. In fact, they actually got to the point that they had to stop selling general admission tickets.

Reserved tickets almost always sell out for this game, so there were no open seats, but the standing-room-only sections also didn’t have much breathing room and fans completely covered the berm seating beyond the outfield wall.

It was a tremendous atmosphere for a midweek game against a SWAC opponent that came into the night at No. 243 in the RPI.

There is no denying that Baum-Walker Stadium is one of the best college baseball venues in the country, if not the best, but Arkansas wouldn’t sell more than 10,000 tickets and have more than 9,000 fans actually show up to a Tuesday night game against a bad team.

Just last week, the Tuesday game against Northwestern State had a paid attendance of 7,659, with only 2,547 scanned. Even the UALR game - the Razorbacks’ first ever against an in-state foe - had a scanned attendance of 3,193 and paid attendance of 7,956.