This Is A DISGRACE To Baseball...

The postseason is just about officially set, as we know what teams are going to make it to the dance. As for the American League, the Houston Astros continue to be the best, winning over 100 games again and clinching home field advantage throughout the postseason. The Yankees are the 2 seed, Cleveland in their first year as the Guardians are the 3 seed, with the 3 wildcard teams following the division winners being the Toronto Blue Jays, Seattle Mariners, and Tampa Bay Rays. All of those teams are incredibly talented. I mean, of course they are, they're playoff teams, but there is one American League playoff team out of the 6 in 2022 that stands out drastically from the rest, and I'm not talking talent-wise. The Oakland A's are dead last in baseball in attendance this season. It's not surprising, considering the A's traded half their roster before the season began, so that turned off the fans to begin with, and that was followed up with one of the worst seasons in franchise history with the team losing over 100 games. So, to see the Coliseum as the ghost town it's been in 2022 makes a lot of sense. To find the second worst attendance in baseball this year, you gotta go over to South Beach where you will find the Marlins. Not surprising. Marlins fans weren't necessarily turned away like A's fans were, as the front office actually made some semi-productive moves to improve the roster. Well, turns out it didn't really do much, as the Marlins are just as bad as they were last season. I mean, pretty much nothing has changed for them. So, add that on top of Miami not being really a baseball city to start with, and you have the second worst attendance in the sport. As for the third worst attendance in baseball this season? The Tampa Bay Rays. That's right. One of the best teams in baseball this season, and a team that is headed to the postseason, is number 28 out of 30 in attendance in 2022. The 2022 Tampa Bay Rays aren't quite as dominant as the 100-win team we saw take the field one year ago, but they're still really solid, and a team that can be looked at as a threat to anybody in the league. They won't necessarily outslug you or pound you to death with their superstars, because they don't really have it. Just a ton of solid hitters who get it done. As far as the pitching goes, ever heard of Jeffrey Springs? How about Drew Rasmussen? If you're not a total baseball nut like I am, well, a lot of baseball nuts probably still don't even know who they are, but it's very easy to let those two names in particular slip through the cracks as far as recognition goes. And that's kind of like the entire Rays pitching staff. Springs has a 2.45 ERA and over 130 innings this season, while Rasmussen has a 2.84 ERA and 146 innings. They've been studs. Shane McClanahan is the ace, and he's been filthy, throwing over 166 innings with a 2.54 ERA, with almost 200 punchouts. Add that onto a good bullpen led by nasty closer Jason Adams, someone I'm sure a lot of you probably aren't familiar with either, and the Rays have a really solid pitching staff. Again, they won't wow you, but that's just the Tampa Bay way, as a lot of their success flies under the radar until the month of October when their players are put in more of a spotlight. So where am I going with this? Well, the Rays being the under-the-radar team shouldn't matter with the attendance. They may not have a phenom like Shohei Otani walking their field, but at this point, I don't think the Rays' seats would be filled up much more, even if they did. The bottom line is that Tropicana Field and its emptiness has gotten old and tiresome. If they were trotting out a horrible product year after year, that's a whole different story, but that's not the case. In fact, the Rays have been one of the most successful teams in all of baseball for almost 15 years now, yet the stands look like a 65-win team. To put this more into perspective, I took the average attendance of every regular season in which the Rays made the postseason minus 2020 for obvious reason, and averaged all of those averages together. You know what that number is? 17,244 fans. In those years combined, out of 1,134 games, the Rays played themselves to a 580 win percentage, winning 658 games. That's a lot of winning, yet through all of it, they averaged barely over 17,000 fans per game. That's a problem. There has, of course, been talk over the years of a possible new ballpark, the team maybe moving to another place, maybe even taking on a new name along with a new city. Hell, there was even talk from the ownership of splitting the season in Tampa Bay and all the way up in Montreal, an idea which of course was shot down by Major League Baseball. Now, this isn't a video to hate on Rays fans, because they do exist. TV ratings have proved such a thing, along with social media support. But one thing is incredibly clear, which is that the Rays are not loved enough where they currently play games. So, what should MLB do about it? There's a few options. For one, move the team to Tampa, which for those who don't know, the team doesn't currently play in Tampa.