A Comically Low Number Of People Went To The Marlins Game Yesterday

The Miami Marlins employ good baseball men like Ichiro, Giancarlo Stanton, and Marcell Ozuna, yet they’re still a sick sort of joke played on the rest of the major leagues. The fish boys are owned by Jeffrey Loria, a comic book villain sketch of an MLB owner who swindled Miami in the worst stadium deal in baseball history. He’s finally selling the Marlins soon, and Major League Baseball will be all the better without him stinking up the joint like an unflushed turd.

The Marlins claimed that 15,197 people attended their game yesterday. That’s not great for a park that can fit over 36,000, but it was a day game on a Wednesday against their fellow toilet dwellers from Philadelphia, so it was never going to be a hot ticket. However, it seems as if the gap between the number of people who supposedly attended and the number who actually came may be wider than it tends to be for games like this, as AP reporter Steve Wine said he counted under 1,600.

Now, Wine may not have gotten a precise count of every single person at the game, but it does not appear that many people went. Look at all the people with Marlins fever!

Overinflation of paid attendance numbers makes precise records of attendance futility somewhat difficult to track, although The Score supposedly claimed that 1,590 would be the lowest attendance mark since 1989 (the Washington Post and others aggregated this claim, although the original post at The Score isn’t on the site anymore.) Regardless, let the empty ballpark serve as yet another example of how wrongheaded it is to pay through the nose to buy stadiums for gross billionaires.