The Tampa Bay Rays fell in Game 1 of their Wild Card series against the Texas Rangers yesterday afternoon. It’s not ideal to start the fall dance this way, but that’s not what caught the attention.
In fact, fewer than 20,000 people came to see their favorites in action in the playoffs. More precisely 19,704 scattered throughout Tropicana Field, or 5,300 less than the capacity of the stadium when we do not open the upper section.
A disaster.
So much so that this is the lowest attendance in the playoffs since 1919, if we exclude the year of the COVID-19 pandemic experienced in 2020, of course.
At that point, Game Seven of the World Series had drawn 13,923 fans to Redland Field in Cincinnati, with the Reds winning the best-of-nine series against the Chicago White Sox in eight games.
The MLB record for the lowest attendance at a playoff game remains Game Five of the 1908 World Series, when only 6,210 people were present at Bennett Park in Detroit. Wow, we congratulate the Rays for not sinking so low!
Besides, let’s return to our sheep, or rather to our Rays.
The worst part of this whole absurd situation is that the Florida team wants to build a new stadium in the same place. The very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
The fact that the match started at 3:08 p.m. and that ticket sales began only a few days before the match in no way excuses this poor performance at the box office in the middle of October.
Tampa Bay simply does not deserve to own an MLB club under these circumstances and major league baseball needs to wake up quickly.
