After Tumultuous Regular Season, MLB Suffers Lowest Postseason Attendance in 100 Years
If a team loses in the playoffs, but nobody’s around to watch it, does it actually count?
Obviously yes, and it’s not like nobody was in attendance when the Texas Rangers traveled to face the Tampa Bay Rays in the AL Wild Card game on Tuesday.
But when the Rangers won 4-0, the most pressing storyline to emerge from that game had to do with the number of fans in attendance — or not in attendance.
According to a report from The Athletic, Tuesday’s Wild Card tilt drew a relatively paltry 19,704 fans to Tropicana Field.
That figure is the lowest postseason attendance number seen since Game 7 (in a best-of-nine) of the infamous 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds — and that game had a number of extenuating factors working against it.
(Of note, all attendance figures are not counting COVID-19 era issues, when fans were not allowed in stadiums.)
For the unaware, the 1919 World Series is often referred to as the “Chicago Black Sox” scandal, wherein various members of the White Sox were given lifetime bans from baseball for betting on the series.
But it wasn’t any hearsay of something untoward happening that deterred fans from attending.
Citing the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), The Athletic reports that the 1919 game only saw 13,923 attendees because the Reds had their fans buy tickets in three-game “blocks.”
That’s fine for your first three home games in a series, but for the fourth game? It presented all manner of logistical issues that stifled the attendance that game.
Tuesday’s game has no such neat and tidy explanation apart from “The Rays just don’t draw — even for the postseason.”
Indeed, that’s the most succinct explanation posited by The Athletic, as the outlet notes that the Rays averaged a meager 17,781 fans per game in the regular season.
Given that, the silver lining for the Rays here is that this playoff game did exceed the team’s average attendance.
The downside then, obviously, is that it still set a century-old low.
For MLB, this is yet another ignominious headline in a season that the league would probably like to quickly leave in the rearview.
As Awful Announcing reported, national viewership of MLB games this year has been stagnant and disappointing.
The Rangers, one of the teams in this game, had a constant negative media cloud hanging over them because they refused to participate LGBT festivities.
And several teams adopted polarizing facial scanning technology this season.
And while those are lingering issues that may become a massive headache eventually, it pales in comparison to the actual national headache that was the Los Angeles Dodgers, one of MLB’s premiere franchises, this season.
The Dodgers came under intense national scrutiny for “honoring” a cross-dressing group of blasphemers known as the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.”
That stunt caused all manner of negative press and backlash which both the Dodgers and MLB tried to brush under the rug as soon as possible.
The Rays lost their Wednesday game and are eliminated from the playoffs.
Game 2 just concluded, and the Rays have been eliminated from the playoffs.
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