Rays Go Quietly In AL Wild Card, Swept By Rangers In Front Of Empty Bleachers

Someone should inform the residents of Tampa, Florida, that their baseball team just got knocked out of the playoffs. They probably won’t be too distressed.

The Tampa Bay Rays lost Game 2 of the American League Wild Card series Wednesday to the Texas Rangers, who will advance to the ALDS to face the Baltimore Orioles. The Rays played very poorly in both games, losing 4-0 and 7-1, finishing a 99-win 2023 season with a bitter 0-2 sweep. But with so little occurring on the field, the crowd (or lack thereof) became the story of this series.

In Game 1 Tuesday, the Rays reported an attendance of 19,704 fans at Tropicana Field. The following day, in the final game of Tampa’s season, 20,198 fans showed up. With a capacity of 42,735 at the Trop, this means that less than half of the seats were filled as one of the best teams in baseball made its fifth straight postseason appearance. The two games earned records as the lowest and second-lowest attended MLB non-pandemic postseason games in more than a century.

Before I scold Rays fans for letting their team down, it’s important to recognize that there are obstacles to attending a Rays game on any day. Tropicana Field is not located in Tampa but in St. Peterburg, a smaller city 26 miles away. The stadium is outdated, providing little comfort to fans by modern standards. The nonretractable roof prevents the team from playing in the Florida sunshine and the field is still artificial turf, a rarity in MLB today.

It didn’t help that the games occurred a little after 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday, presumably when many people were working. But this is where the excuses end for Rays fans. In 2019 and 2021, Tampa also hosted playoff games and did not come close to selling out the stadium for any of them. It’s impossible to know if this has any correlation to the team’s notorious lack of postseason success, but it’s hard to imagine the team playing worse than it did against Texas in this most recent series.

It feels obvious to say, but when your team makes the postseason, you go. The travel across the Tampa Bay area to St. Petersburg could very well be a pain, but there are plenty of examples of fans going out of their way to support their teams. No one in New York would ever be caught dead in East Rutherford, New Jersey, on any day but Sunday, as the Jets and Giants have boasted high attendance numbers at MetLife Stadium for years.

The Rays are a frustrating story of talent failing to transfer to popularity, as outside factors prevent the team from enjoying the same fanbase shared by other teams in the area. The NFL’s Buccaneers have seldom enjoyed packed stadiums by NFL standards, but the fanbase is loyal and passionate and promises some noise every weekend. The NHL’s Lightning is consistently one of the most watched teams in the league. The Rays, a consistently strong team with star power and wins to back up their reputation, were booed by their own scattershot crowd as they ended yet another postseason run prematurely.

“Some boos starting to come down from the group,” ESPN commentator Sean McDonough said during Game 2. “I’m not sure we can call it a crowd. The group here at the Trop.”