The Colorado Rockies are the worst team in the MLB this year (and it’s not close), and still have a good shot at becoming the worst team in the history of baseball’s modern era, but the club has started to win a little more in the second half of the season.
Sunday’s chaotic win over the Arizona Diamondbacks marked the second consecutive series that the Rockies won, and the fifth series the team emerged victorious in since the Midsummer Classic. There was another eight-game losing streak in there, but hey, a club that has struggled this bad has to take every win it can get. While the winning on the field has slightly gone up, the attendance in the stands at Coors Field has done the opposite.
No, last week’s two-game sellout for the Savannah Bananas does not count towards the Rockies’ attendance, even though those 100,000+ tickets put a decent chunk of money in Dick Monfort’s pocket.
Back at the All-Star break, the Rockies were still in the top half of the league in terms of attendance at No. 14, with an average of 30,128 tickets sold per game. A month later, those numbers have dropped enough to slide the Blake Street Bombers (one day, the club will live up to that nickname again) to No. 16 in the league with an average attendance of 29,826.
The signs that the attendance numbers are dropping are fairly clear as well. The stadium has not been as crowded as it usually is on warm, weekend nights as more fans try their best to spend less money on the team in an effort to potentially spark some change. This week’s series against the Los Angeles Dodgers will be the big tell on how much change is actually taking place at Coors Field, as that is the series that usually gets the closest to selling out the best bar in Denver.
Other teams that are in the depths of the standings like the Pirates, the White Sox and the Marlins all have average attendance numbers under 20,000, a sign that fans are trying to make a statement that they don’t want to go to the park to watch a losing team. The difference between those cities and Denver is that the majority of fans in Coors Field on any given night are transplants rooting for the other team or people who are just there to enjoy the rooftop, not people who actually care about Rockies baseball.
It’s going to take a much steeper drop than this for the Rockies’ brass to even consider doing what the fans want them to do — sell the team. At the end of the day, the Rockies are a business, one that makes plenty of money to keep that family happy even though the team has no light at the end of the tunnel.
