Before I head up north for the weekend, thought I’d mention Halladay’s start last night.
Doc was great, as usual, and kept the Jays in the game. Another tough loss, 4-2, in what’s been a stretch of continuous losses. Really, I don’t think the fans cared about the Win once Halladay left after 9 innings…He got through a tough top of the frame, got a standing ovation, before the bullpen promptly blew it.
Speaking of the crowd, I’m shocked at the attendance number. 24,000 is brutal, but it didn’t seem bad at the time. I would have guessed something around 30-35k…weird.
In any case, those who showed up gave Doc a great reception all night…plenty of standing ovations and chants, along with some “keep Doc, trade JP signs”…nice.
But why weren’t there more people?
Gotta run.
-DL
Yeah, the crowd felt great, to be honest. I’ve been to a lot of games and I can’t believe it was only 24k. It really looked like a pretty solid crowd. As you said, 30k + for sure.
At least the TV numbers continue to be really strong. 400,000 for Jays-Red Sox last week. I guess you can’t blame people for watching on TV instead of going down to the dome when the team’s been so mediocre for so long. Still I have found the disparity between high TV numbers and low attendance this year odd.
I would love to have the sportsmedia in this city actually talk about tha attendance drop of the Jays in a more in depth and smarter fashion.
Early in the year they always say that it’s because of hockey playoffs, but I just don’t buy that. The Raptors go head to head with hockey all year long and when the Raptors are doing well they hold there own pretty well in attendance and of course the sports nobody in the sportsmedia wants to talk about, but TFC and BMO field sees no drop off in attendance during the hockey playoffs. If hockey was such a difference maker and take sports fans away from other sports, then why the Raptors hold well when they are doing well and TFC has full houses no matter if it’s hockey playoff time.
Now they (rogers owned sports radio station) are blaming the audience, which I think is breaking the first rule of business, blaming the customer.
What worries me most about the Jays is the people in charge and the people following doesn’t want to actually look at the real problem of why attendance is so down. There are still BlueJays fans out there, they are just rejecting going to the Skydome for mulitiple reasons.
I’ll give a few reasons like raising ticket prices during a recession and at the same time cutting team payroll.
Another problem is Skydome itself, there is no benefit of going to the game instead of watching it on TV. You see a game at BMO (or pallparks like Wrigley and Fenway) and the atmosphere really makes you feel that it added something to the experience than watching it on TV, you don’t have that at the Dome. But they aren’t even appealing to people who like it the other way (go out to a relaxing night at the ballpark) the last few years the Dome has been so heavy on the between innings video ads that takes away from the people who want a relaxing night out.
The Jays/Dome is in a weird spot, they are too stuffy for the fans who want to be loud and party type sports experience. But their ads/marketing are too noisy/busy for people who want a simple quiet ballpark outing. Plus of course the obvious reason of fans just giving up on a team that even when they are good we all know there is no chance of competiting with Yanks and BoSox and I think the Jays underestimated the popularity of the live product of TFC.
It’s not really a big deal. I think it’s cause they were supposed to suck this year and by the time most folks noticed the good start, they started sucking again. Looking at espn.com, last year theyre 18/30 in attendance…right now 25/30 within 500 tix a game of 22/30. Not a big deal just a bad year.