We’ll start with a Letter to the Editor from over the weekend in the Tampa Tribune: a baseball fan in Zephyrhills, Fla. (about 35-40 min from Tampa and 55-60 min from St. Pete) tries to take a “Trop half-full” approach to the Stadium Saga:
Tropicana Field is, in my opinion, a quality stadium, which was confirmed to me again last Saturday night, as we enjoyed the game and Martina McBride’s concert, dry and in air-conditioned comfort while the area was being blessed with a thunderstorm.
Apparently, not a ton of people agree with the reader right now, because the Rays fell to 29th in the 2013 MLB attendance rankings after a long homestand. Their 17,909 fans per game are more than 2,000 fewer than at the same point in 2012. (The Indians surged ahead to 28th place with 38k+ on Dollar Hot Dog & Fireworks night.)
But at least the Rays aren’t the Marlins, who dropped to last this weekend, with 17,337 fans on average. That’s down more than 11,000 per game in a year, and as Biz of Baseball‘s Maury Brown writes, it’s not due for any sort of correction:
Between the fire sale to the Blue Jays and the abysmal performance on the field that will likely have them, not the Astros, end with the worst record in baseball, attendance will continue to slide. In the meantime, all those clubs that have suffered through the cold, wet spring with open-air ballparks will begin to see increases as people flock to enjoy the sun during the summer….Florida now has the dubious distinction of having the two worst attended clubs in all of MLB.
More from Noah Pransky’s award-winning Shadow of the Stadium blog here.
