Attendance is down across baseball this year. On average it’s down on the order of a few hundred a game. In Los Angeles, however, things are way worse: 7,268 fans a game off the 2010 pace for the Dodgers. And, as Steve Dilbeck reminds us, that’s just in official attendance, not actual turnstile numbers, which Major League Baseball doesn’t report. Dodger Stadium has looked way emptier than the numbers suggest.
Dillbeck suspects, based on comments to his blog, that there’s a fan boycott afoot related to the McCourt fiasco. I’m somewhat skeptical simply because fan boycotts rarely if ever gain real traction, even if organized and endorsed by influential media voices (ask the talk radio people who tried to organize them with respect to the Mets and the Detroit Lions in recent years). Yes, I’m sure there are some people avoiding games in Los Angeles because of their McCourt distaste, but I bet the pall cast Bryan Stow beating, the unexciting hot stove season for the Dodgers and the middling-at-best prospects for the playoffs this year have more to do with it.
But whether there truly is a boycott or not, I totally whiffed on a grandstanding opportunity. After I wrote something about the McCourts last winter, one of my best friends sent me an email in which he -- half-jokingly, but not really -- suggested that I try to organize an anti-McCourt Dodgers’ boycott. I think he had the best interests of my media profile in greater mind than the fate of the Dodgers, but man, if I had listened to him and done a half dozen posts arguing for such a boycott and maybe printing up t-shirts and stuff I could totally be claiming credit for the plunge in Dodgers attendance so far this year. And now I could be issuing demands and getting phat talking head gigs on TV.
Sigh. Lost opportunities.
