Angry fans were turned away from the gate as a packed house came out to see the Marlins host the Reds today at Miami’s Sun Life Stadium. Miami continues to cement its legacy as the worst professional sports town in America. This appears to be an actual picture from an actual MLB game played today in Miami between the Reds and the Marlins.
(I’ll give you time to soak in the fact that the picture above is a MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL GAME!!)
My God!! I’ve seen some empty stadiums before, but if Bud Selig ever saw this picture he would be crumpled up on the floor with a blanket singing show tunes. Well, he’s probably doing that already, but still! I’ve seen more people attend rec league basketball games. I’ve seen more people in my college astrophysics class. I’ve seen more people attend a showing of The Adventures of Pluto Nash. I’ve seen… well, you get the point.
All this is happening while the Little League World Series is drawing over 30k for some games. The Marlins are (unsurprisingly) last in MLB in attendance, averaging a laughably inflated 18,241 fans per game. I can’t wait to see the announced attendance figure of this game, but extrapolating this picture, there may be a maximum of 462 fans actually in attendance today. That would place Marlins games somewhere in-between the UFL and my local Y’s squash tournament final in terms of attendance figures. Homeless street musicians draw bigger crowds than this.
Why is nobody at the game? Well, it’s a summer day in Miami. I can’t wait to see the reaction to this kind of crowd showing up in the brand new Marlins stadium owned by Miami-Dade County. What a great investment that will prove to be.
*Update: And yes, as some on Twitter have pointed out, the game was just recently moved up because of Hurricane Irene, which is a fair point… but this crowd is par for the course for the Marlins and an estimated 347 fans in attendance for an MLB game in an area of nearly 2.5 million people at any time speaks for itself.
