After a good start the Marlins have plummeted to last place in the NL East at 43-48 and rank dead last among MLB teams in attendance with 17,101 per game.
And that’s tickets sold, which as I learned while attending games at Dodger Stadium a couple times last week can be incredibly misleading.
With no fans to fill the seats the Marlins have decided to simply close off the entire upper deck in Sun Life Stadium, with spokesman P.J. Loyello telling Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald that “it was an operational decision” and “we don’t sell a whole lot of upper deck seats.”
This way the Marlins won’t have to actually hire ushers or security officers or anyone else to watch over the empty sections and the few fans who have upper deck season tickets will be “upgraded” to better seats, which they were probably already doing on their own unofficially each game.
I realize the Marlins closing off entire sections of their ballpark because no one sits there is prime joke material, but they’re actually not the first team to do so. Back when the Twins were still in the Metrodome they covered the worst seats in right field with a giant white (and eventually brownish-white from dirt) sheet that formed a makeshift tent over the empty seats and also had pictures of the players with their numbers retired. And there are other examples too.
Dodger Stadium might have followed suit, except the team couldn’t afford the white sheet. Rimshot?
