Major League Baseball has told the Major League Baseball Players Association that there will be 60 games this year, followed by a normal playoff schedule. There is a chance the players could turn down the owners. Whatever the conclusion is, without fans in the seats, five teams probably will watch their fan attendance drop from over 3 million a year to zero. This will be the case if the league never lets people back into stadiums because of the risks of COVID-19 infection.
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In the 2019 season, the Los Angeles Dodgers had the largest annual attendance for home games. Most teams would have had 81 home games. That represents a loss of 3,974,309 people for the Dodgers. Next on the list of teams ranked by ballpark attendance, the St. Louis Cardinals had 3,480,393 last year. That was followed by the New York Yankees, which had an attendance of 3,304,404. After that, the Chicago Cubs had an attendance of 3,094,865 and the Los Angeles Angels had 3,023,010.
Another 13 teams had an attendance of between 2 million and 3 million during the course of the season. Eleven teams had an attendance of between 1 million and 2 million.
One financial drawback of games without fans in stadiums, after a huge loss in ticket sales, is the cost to maintain empty facilities. Fortunately, those costs are relatively small. Much of the electricity bills are gone. So are clean up and repairs of damage done by fans. However, that is not much comfort.
Televised games are not of much interest to the fan bases of the MLB teams. Tens of millions of fans won’t have anywhere, in stadiums, to sit.
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