There are a lot of reasons why a playoff team may have trouble selling tickets. Maybe the fans are dispirited. Maybe it’s just not a baseball town. In the case of the Los Angeles Dodgers, though -- a team that consistently leads all of baseball in attendance and almost always sells out playoff games -- one can’t help but wonder if the scheduling is hurting them.
The Dodgers first NLDS game was not a sellout. It was reported as 53,901 -- a huge number of fans -- but not a sellout in the cavernous Dodger Stadium, which has a listed capacity of 56,000. Today, things may be bleaker. As of an hour ago, get-in price for today’s game was as low as $6.95 on secondary markets, which are said to have a “huge glut” of Game 4 tickets:
$6.95 get-in price for Game 3 at Dodger Stadium today. first pitch scheduled for 2pm local time. #postseason #NLDS pic.twitter.com/l4ZbZA5XcK
— Empty Seats Galore (@EmptySeatsPics) October 11, 2016
Yesterday’s less-than-capacity crowd could have something to do with it being scheduled for 1pm on a Monday when people have to go to work and school. Today’s glut, however, is being fueled by both a day game -- it’s a 2pm local start -- and the fact that the time of the game was not set until after midnight Los Angeles time last night by virtue of Major League Baseball scheduling dependent on the outcome of the Cubs-Giants game, which went into the wee, wee hours. The 2pm start holds now, but if the Cubs had won, the Dodgers game would’ve been moved to 5pm local time, and no one in Los Angeles knew when the game would’ve been until after midnight last night.
It’s hard enough to fill a stadium that holds 56,000 people. It’s harder still to fill a 56,000-seat stadium on a weekday. It’s harder still, however, to fill it when the game time could change by three hours depending on what happens the early morning of that day’s game. And then you have to remember that Yom Kippur begins at sundown tonight, meaning that a 5pm game -- which would’ve ended after sundown -- was going to preclude a certain number of fans from attending in the first place, likely causing many to hold off purchasing tickets.
I’m sure Dodger Stadium will look pretty full today and, heck, maybe those cheap prices will cause a late run on tickets and there will, in fact, be a sellout. But it seems to me that MLB does its clubs and secondary market ticket partners no favors by not having a hard, set time for games several days in advance.