The Tampa Bay Rays opened their 2023 postseason journey at home, at Tropicana Field, against the Texas Rangers.
They ended up being blanked by Jordan Montgomery, Aroldis Chapman, and José LeClerc and lost 4-0.
Losing a game shouldn’t be a reason to be ashamed or worried: it can happen even to the best teams.
However, the Rays keep fighting against a cruel reality: feeling the support of a huge home crowd is always a challenge, even in the postseason.
In fact, they set a franchise low for attendance in a playoff game and registered the lowest attendance for any MLB postseason game since 1919.
“Official attendance for today’s Rangers-Rays game: 19,704. That’s the lowest for an MLB postseason game since 1919,” Front Office Sports tweeted.
Official attendance for today’s Rangers-Rays game: 19,704.
That’s the lowest for an MLB postseason game since 1919.
(h/t @TylerKepner)
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) October 3, 2023
1919!
That’s a long time.
The Rays, a 99-win team with some of the smartest executives and player development models in baseball, couldn’t even get 20,000 people to the stadium in the first game of the postseason.
Tropicana Field has long been considered as one of the worst stadiums in baseball.
The team recently announced a project to build another stadium in St. Petersburg.
The hope is that the more modern ballpark will attract more people, but questions about its location – Tropicana Field is also in St. Petersburg – remain.
The new field will be built near Tropicana Field and will include redevelopment of the 86-acre Historic Gas Plant District.
The new stadium will be ready around 2028.
Until then, the franchise will have the same challenge it has had ever since their inception in 1998: getting people to the ballpark.
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