Tuesday, March 3, 2009

A Note About The Attendance For Today's Yankee Exhibition Game Against Team USA

Apparently, today's Yankee Spring Training game at Steinbrenner Field against the star-studded team USA was not sold out.

Lets take a look at the attendance figures for this year's Spring Training slate so far at Steiny Field:

10,693 vs. Rays
10,686 vs. Twins
8,822 vs. Team USA

So, residents of the state of Florida would prefer to see the Minnesota Twins Double-A and Triple-A players get a couple of at bats each instead of seeing Chipper Jones, Adam Dunn, David Wright, Ryan Braun get a full game's worth of at bats?

In the most damning evidence for Floridians, the Yankees drew a crowd of 10,482 for an exhibition game against the University of South Floriday last February. Hardcore Yankee fans will remember it as the game that Kei Igawa got lit up by college kids.

Peter Abraham attributes the low attendance to the fact that exhibition games against WBC teams were added to the schedule late, preventing people from planning ahead to see the game. This is simply not true. I was planning a trip to Spring Training (the recession ruined that plan) since this past fall, and I had my eye on this game as the premiere game of the entire slate. I assumed it would be the first game to sell out.

It is common knowledge that Spring Training games often feature 2 innings of starters and 7 innings of minor leaguers. One would assume that even if team USA decided to give their starters a rest, the replacements would be major league starters.

The popular news aggregating website Fark.com has a special tag for Florida news stories, because the people there do such dumb things on such a regular basis. This inexplicably low attendance in relation to other Spring Training games in Tampa definitely would qualify for Fark's Florida tag.


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