11 Triple-A Games Drew More Fans Than The Oakland A's On Tuesday
The Oakland attendance issues have gone from embarrassing to just plain sad. I blogged last week the lackluster crowd for an Opening Day game with Shohei Ohtani on the mound for the visiting Angels and things have only gotten worse from there.
Really, the only surprising part of the headline of this blog is that there were two Triple-A games that didn't have more fans in the ballpark than the allegedly 3,407 at the A's game. Minor league teams usually have cool promotions and other enticements to get fans through the turnstiles — especially during the week — something that certainly does not exist at the RingCentral Coliseum. I'm going to Dollar Dog Night over any Oakland A's game 11 times out of 10.
If this is what the crowds look like during the first week of the season, I can't imagine the attendance numbers we're going to see in August and September when this team is 30 games under .500. Based on these first few games, I think there's a real chance the A's announce an attendance below 1,000 this season.
I really do feel for the fans in Oakland, because that team has some truly horrific management and ownership. But whether the solution is forcing a sale of the team or moving the team somewhere else, we can't just continue to have a team actively losing on purpose in front of 3,000 people in a stadium that's one step above a landfill. Something's gotta give sooner or later.