Tampa’s attendance is better than it to defense.
Poor stadium and poor location are just excuses. Good baseball fans will go anywhere to follow their team.
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The Tampa Bay area is filled with people from somewhere else. The football and hockey teams have done a great job of cultivating fans and sell out regularly. The homes of both teams are in Tampa, the population center of the area. I guess they’re just not good baseball fans.
It only took two years for Correa to become relevant again.
Lewis/Buxton/Correa is not a core I’d rely on to stay healthy.
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Wheeler is flat out dealing tonight. I’m expecting Yordan to turn this upside down at any minute.
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Shameful
The problem with attendance isn’t the building, it’s the location. A new, shiny ballpark will get an initial boost from the existing one, but that doesn’t fix the problem, which is that giant body of water between it and the fanbase. It’s like a castle moat.
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No doubt. But I wasn’t referring to attendance. I was referring to the ballpark experience being better.
I mean, it’s not the worst ballpark I’ve ever been in. And the area around the stadium is pretty cool too.
That’s the thing. The Trop gets blamed a lot for low attendance but it’s really not bad as a place to watch a game. The worst part is it’s indoors. It’s so much more about the “moat” you speak of.
The worst ballpark I’ve ever been in was the Ballpark at Arlington. Like sitting in a kiln.
Wrigley was the best experience just for the history of it, but Camden Yards is still the best I’ve visited.
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You guys most familiar with the area say Tropicana Field not a bad place to see a game, but the reason for the abysmal attendance is because it’s a hard place to get to. Is that correct?
For a majority of the population of the Tampa Bay area, yes.
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I get that for regular season games. But less than 20,000 for a playoff game, granted it was a day game and on short notice too, is still sad to me. I always root for the Rays, they are probably my second favorite team, they are so often cast as the underdogs and overachievers and I find that somewhat endearing. I’m also the kind of nut who thinks nothing of driving 170 miles to see a playoff game.
ETA: Fuck the Rangers
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It’s hard to overstate just how much in the middle of nowhere that place is. It’s like the Astros putting their stadium in Lake Jackson.
It may not be the place, or even somewhere you would want to go, but I wouldn’t call it the middle of nowhere.
I see what you are getting at and yes, there is a fundamental failure of the fanbase to embrace the Rays the same way you would expect from, say, Arizona or Colorado. But a big part of the reasoning behind that failure…aside from the bare fact that there are so many people in this area from other places with other allegiences…is that the stadium is very hard to get to for most of the people in the area and it’s a bland baseball experience.
It’s not the middle of nowhere, it’s just on the extreme edge. And guarded by a treacherous bridge. And a nasty bunny rabbit.
With big pointy teeth?
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Wait til it turns out the new ballpark is just a model.
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