Another gloomy night with too many empty seats at the Rogers Centre paints a confusing, confounding and contradictory picture of the present and future for the Blue Jays.
Neither the sky — nor what they used to call the SkyDome — is falling.
But never has a three-game series against the popular Boston Red Sox been played in so dismal a Toronto atmosphere.
“It’s a shame,” said Aaron Hill, the Blue Jays’ best player. “I really wish everybody would get to know these guys. We have a good bunch of guys who play the game the right way. That’s what baseball fans should want and should appreciate.”
“We see the stands, we notice it, but there’s really nothing we can do about it. We don’t have any answers for it.”
The Blue Jays have become the latest sporting equivalent of pornography. People will happily watch it from their homes. They’re just not ready to buy tickets or be seen at the ballpark: The Blue Jays average attendance of 15,877 is the lowest in all of baseball.
The Monday and Tuesday night crowds at the Rogers Centre were alarmingly small and silent considering the Red Sox were the opponent. But the televison numbers on Rogers Sportsnet were amazingly strong. That is the contradiction: People are watching not buying. The audience for Tuesday night’s game was 525,000. The night before, opposite Game 6 of the Montreal-Washington playoff series, the Jays did 351,500 on Sportsnet. The home opener had a television audience of 796,000.
Baseball may be dead at the ball park: It isn’t dead in Canadian homes.
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