There has been an awful lot of chatter about attendance in the first couple weeks of season, driven mostly by empty seats in places that aren’t usually empty like Dodger Stadium. Yankee Stadium has had some small crowds too (for the Yankees anyway) and we’ve had the usual shots of nearly abandoned ballparks in Cleveland and Florida and places like that.
I think a ton of this has had to do with the weather -- they scheduled way too many home games for the Yankees in April -- and my suspicion has been, based on earlier reports of advanced ticket sales, that what we’ve been seeing and hearing about is really more an anecdotal thing as opposed to a real thing. Darren Rovell of CNBC crunched some numbers and pretty much confirms this:
It’s weather mostly. And, as Rovell notes, there have been bigger crowds than usual in places we tend not to see as often during the early editions of Sports Center: San Francisco, Oakland and Toronto. No biggie.