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I thought I’d seen some incredible lies in attendance in college football but this may be the worst I’ve seen and it’s MLB:
974 fans watched the the Chicago White Sox play Tampa Bay on Monday.
10,377 was the announced attendance.

They have a new stadium being built in Ybor city. This is gonna vastly improve their attendance. Heck, I might even go to a game considering how much closer it would be to Orlando.

This was in Chicago.


The 10,377 was likely tickets sold.

Baseball at all levels report tickets sold, not people through the turnstiles.

(04-11-2018 11:06 AM)billybobby777 Wrote: [ -> ]I thought I’d seen some incredible lies in attendance in college football but this may be the worst I’ve seen and it’s MLB:
974 fans watched the the Chicago White Sox play Tampa Bay on Monday.
10,377 was the announced attendance.

To be sure, it snowed in the morning in Chicago, the Cubs actually cancelled their home opener that was scheduled to be played at the exact same time a few miles away due to the bad weather, and the start time for the White Sox game was changed at the very last minute (where it was originally supposed to be a night game and was changed to be a weekday afternoon game when most people are at work). The White Sox certainly have attendance issues, but the alarmist news articles about this are piling on when there were a whole lot of reasons why this game attendance was particularly horrible. I'm as big of a White Sox fan as anyone and you couldn't have paid me to sit out there on that particular day.

I’m a South Sider and Sox STH. I’ll admit I don’t even bother going to games until May anymore. I’ve been to April games in previous years where there couldn’t have been 1k actual people.

Here’s an article yesterday on the Armour Field that was shot down by Reinsdorf. The dimensions are crazy. It was basically the Polo Grounds in a neighborhood setting. Instead a new stadium facing the projects was built where Row 1 UD was 15 feet further away than the final UD row at old Comiskey (God I wish I could’ve seen Comiskey 1.0).

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/the-w...d-history/

It's cold, the game time was changed the day before to 1 pm, and it's two crappy teams. If I had a ticket to the game, I think I would rather be warm at work rather than at the park too.

PS
I would only choose work over baseball if the weather is cold, which it was for this game. If it were June (or warm in general), you can catch me at the park.

Reinsdorf sucks

Several of the articles/blogs I've seen have been pretty fair reporting not just them temp but how windy it was and that it's the only time the Rays travel to the Sox so not getting the game in would be a problem.

(04-11-2018 03:14 PM)IWokeUpLikeThis Wrote: [ -> ]I’m a South Sider and Sox STH. I’ll admit I don’t even bother going to games until May anymore. I’ve been to April games in previous years where there couldn’t have been 1k actual people.

Here’s an article yesterday on the Armour Field that was shot down by Reinsdorf. The dimensions are crazy. It was basically the Polo Grounds in a neighborhood setting. Instead a new stadium facing the projects was built where Row 1 UD was 15 feet further away than the final UD row at old Comiskey (God I wish I could’ve seen Comiskey 1.0).

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/the-w...d-history/

Should've done that, if not renovate Comiskey like they've done with Wrigley. I came across two other concepts a while back in the links below, the first one is weird with the convertible stands but the second would be a killer location with how the West Loop has come along now. Probably cost too much with the retractable roof and land value of the neighborhood.

http://www.stadiumpage.com/concepts/85Co...ble_R.html
http://www.stadiumpage.com/concepts/85Ch...mes_R.html

(04-11-2018 11:28 AM)otown Wrote: [ -> ]They have a new stadium being built in Ybor city. This is gonna vastly improve their attendance. Heck, I might even go to a game considering how much closer it would be to Orlando.

They have a proposal. It's a long way from becoming official, let alone built.

(04-11-2018 03:14 PM)IWokeUpLikeThis Wrote: [ -> ]I’m a South Sider and Sox STH. I’ll admit I don’t even bother going to games until May anymore. I’ve been to April games in previous years where there couldn’t have been 1k actual people.

Here’s an article yesterday on the Armour Field that was shot down by Reinsdorf. The dimensions are crazy. It was basically the Polo Grounds in a neighborhood setting. Instead a new stadium facing the projects was built where Row 1 UD was 15 feet further away than the final UD row at old Comiskey (God I wish I could’ve seen Comiskey 1.0).

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/the-w...d-history/

New Comiskey being designed more for auto traffic than pedestrian leads me to believe that Reinsdorf wanted the fans to drive to businesses he owned that were apparently nowhere near the ballpark. If he thought to sell those and buy some businesses near the proposed Armour Park area, he might have come out better in the long run. His loss though, just like the idiot owners of the Atlanta Braves!!

(04-11-2018 11:06 AM)billybobby777 Wrote: [ -> ]I thought I’d seen some incredible lies in attendance in college football but this may be the worst I’ve seen and it’s MLB:
974 fans watched the the Chicago White Sox play Tampa Bay on Monday.
10,377 was the announced attendance.

Combine snow, cold, and what (for now) is a bad baseball team and it's not surprising that people didn't show.

I'm a Sox fan, my mother is a Sox fan, my grandfather was a Sox fan. Sox fans are folks who love their team, support their team, but aren't going to be blind about it (unlike a certain team 8 miles north). If you expect Sox fans to have your back, they expect you to put a product on the field worthy of their loyalty. My problem is that being in Wisconsin, it's a 4-5 hour trip, assuming traffic isn't horrible, that's why I try and catch them at Miller Park.

(04-11-2018 09:30 PM)Ohio Poly Wrote: [ -> ]

(04-11-2018 11:28 AM)otown Wrote: [ -> ]They have a new stadium being built in Ybor city. This is gonna vastly improve their attendance. Heck, I might even go to a game considering how much closer it would be to Orlando.

They have a proposal. It's a long way from becoming official, let alone built.

Yes, baseball stadium politics in the TB area go back more than 30 years, and the fans have always suffered.

Now, that political battle has been settled (basically, the St Pete side has capitulated to the inevitability of a Tampa location), but now the issue is a financially weak club trying to get money from a cash-strapped city and state to subsidize their stadium.

Could be a while, indeed.

The Rays should move to Montreal.

(04-12-2018 09:10 AM)Hokie4Skins Wrote: [ -> ]The Rays should move to Montreal.

They will give downtown Tampa a shot. The St Pete location and lousy stadium has been used as the excuse for the anemic attendance for 20 years, and the reasons it resonates is because (a) the stadium is terrible, and (b) in terms of the geography of the area, the St Pete location does suck.

Thing is though, I don't think those are the real problems. One problem is the nature of the TB area. It's spread out over a very large area, and there is no public transportation worth mentioning, so a significant number of fans will still have a terrible car commute no matter where the stadium is.

The other problem is the nature of Tampa Bay's relationship to baseball. While Tampa Bay has a rich baseball legacy, its contours are as an area that has produced great baseball talent (e.g., Lou Piniella, Dwight Gooden, Steve Garvey, Al Lopez, Gary Sheffield, Fred McGriff, Wade Boggs, Tony La Russa), and as a location for spring training for northern clubs (Tampa is basically the New York Yankee's second home - George M Steinbrenner Field is a great place to catch a Yankees spring game). Plus, the area is filled with transplants and retirees from up north, who generally don't abandon life-long attachments to the teams they grew up with.

So the fan base for every day MLB attendance is spread out, and not very committed to Rays baseball, and that's true wherever they put the stadium and whatever amenities it will have.

I would love to go to a MLB game with only 937 in attendance. Sounds like a blast compared to being shoehorned in with 30,000 drunk-ass Southsiders.

Or Cubs fans, for the record.

(04-11-2018 11:06 AM)billybobby777 Wrote: [ -> ]I thought I’d seen some incredible lies in attendance in college football but this may be the worst I’ve seen and it’s MLB:
974 fans watched the the Chicago White Sox play Tampa Bay on Monday.
10,377 was the announced attendance.

The White Sox ticket office people obviously earned their accounting degrees from Eastern Michigan and Kent State

(04-12-2018 09:28 AM)quo vadis Wrote: [ -> ]

(04-12-2018 09:10 AM)Hokie4Skins Wrote: [ -> ]The Rays should move to Montreal.

They will give downtown Tampa a shot. The St Pete location and lousy stadium has been used as the excuse for the anemic attendance for 20 years, and the reasons it resonates is because (a) the stadium is terrible, and (b) in terms of the geography of the area, the St Pete location does suck.

Thing is though, I don't think those are the real problems. One problem is the nature of the TB area. It's spread out over a very large area, and there is no public transportation worth mentioning, so a significant number of fans will still have a terrible car commute no matter where the stadium is.

The other problem is the nature of Tampa Bay's relationship to baseball. While Tampa Bay has a rich baseball legacy, its contours are as an area that has produced great baseball talent (e.g., Lou Piniella, Dwight Gooden, Steve Garvey, Al Lopez, Gary Sheffield, Fred McGriff, Wade Boggs, Tony La Russa), and as a location for spring training for northern clubs (Tampa is basically the New York Yankee's second home - George M Steinbrenner Field is a great place to catch a Yankees spring game). Plus, the area is filled with transplants and retirees from up north, who generally don't abandon life-long attachments to the teams they grew up with.

So the fan base for every day MLB attendance is spread out, and not very committed to Rays baseball, and that's true wherever they put the stadium and whatever amenities it will have.

I don't think the Ybor location will make them the second coming of the Yankees attendance wise, but I do think they are more than capable of being a mid pack MLB attendance team as long as they put out a decent product. The Ybor location can also attract the nightlife crowd going to the ybor District or hoping on the streetcar to Channelside.
This is in addition to adding essentially a whole new market (even though Orlando is "technically" a new market. I can get to Ybor in just under an hour with no traffic. Getting to St Pete requires dealing with the crappy I4/275 interchange, heart of Tampa traffic, and then a never ending journey over the bridge to St Pete. At its worst, we are talking about a 2-3 hours commute from Orlando........ this is why they must move and I finally think everyone is on the same page......... finally. Just gotta come up with the $$$$.

(04-13-2018 05:39 AM)otown Wrote: [ -> ]

(04-12-2018 09:28 AM)quo vadis Wrote: [ -> ]

(04-12-2018 09:10 AM)Hokie4Skins Wrote: [ -> ]The Rays should move to Montreal.

They will give downtown Tampa a shot. The St Pete location and lousy stadium has been used as the excuse for the anemic attendance for 20 years, and the reasons it resonates is because (a) the stadium is terrible, and (b) in terms of the geography of the area, the St Pete location does suck.

Thing is though, I don't think those are the real problems. One problem is the nature of the TB area. It's spread out over a very large area, and there is no public transportation worth mentioning, so a significant number of fans will still have a terrible car commute no matter where the stadium is.

The other problem is the nature of Tampa Bay's relationship to baseball. While Tampa Bay has a rich baseball legacy, its contours are as an area that has produced great baseball talent (e.g., Lou Piniella, Dwight Gooden, Steve Garvey, Al Lopez, Gary Sheffield, Fred McGriff, Wade Boggs, Tony La Russa), and as a location for spring training for northern clubs (Tampa is basically the New York Yankee's second home - George M Steinbrenner Field is a great place to catch a Yankees spring game). Plus, the area is filled with transplants and retirees from up north, who generally don't abandon life-long attachments to the teams they grew up with.

So the fan base for every day MLB attendance is spread out, and not very committed to Rays baseball, and that's true wherever they put the stadium and whatever amenities it will have.

I don't think the Ybor location will make them the second coming of the Yankees attendance wise, but I do think they are more than capable of being a mid pack MLB attendance team as long as they put out a decent product. The Ybor location can also attract the nightlife crowd going to the ybor District or hoping on the streetcar to Channelside.
This is in addition to adding essentially a whole new market (even though Orlando is "technically" a new market. I can get to Ybor in just under an hour with no traffic. Getting to St Pete requires dealing with the crappy I4/275 interchange, heart of Tampa traffic, and then a never ending journey over the bridge to St Pete. At its worst, we are talking about a 2-3 hours commute from Orlando........ this is why they must move and I finally think everyone is on the same page......... finally. Just gotta come up with the $$$$.

That's a good point. I recall that when I used to vacation in St Pete, if i drove to Disney World, fully 40% of the entire trip in miles and almost half in terms of time was just getting from St Pete to the eastern edge of Tampa.

As I said, it's a sprawling area, and as you said, that I4/275 interchange and traffic can be a beast. For you guys to the east, that's all largely avoided with an Ybor location.