Six months of miserable baseball in the Bronx came to a fitting end on Monday.
The Yankees’ 81st and final home game of the season was an afternoon makeup game against the Diamondbacks, and all the ingredients were there for it to be a dismal day at the ballpark.
For one thing, New York had been officially eliminated from postseason contention after losing the day before to Arizona. On top of that, Monday’s game was a makeup of a game initially scheduled for Saturday, and the rain that caused Saturday’s game to be postponed still lingered as temperatures struggled to crack 60 degrees. Who’s going to show up at 1 p.m. on Monday in conditions like that?
As it turns out, hardly anybody. Look at how many empty seats there were at the stadium.
An updated look at the Yankee Stadium crowd here in the sixth inning.
— Max Goodman (@MaxTGoodman) September 25, 2023
By my count, there’s fewer than 50 fans in all seven bleacher sections combined. pic.twitter.com/wK602TG57v
That’s not surprising. The surprising part is that the Yankees announced an attendance of 41,096. Yankee Stadium has 47,309 seats, and I’m pretty sure there were more than empty 6,213 chairs.
The Yankees offered fans with tickets for Saturday’s game the opportunity to exchange them for tickets to a game next season. Judging by the photo, the vast majority of fans decided to take that option. But MLB teams report attendance based on the number of tickets sold, not the number of fans who pass through the turnstiles.
Whatever the true number of fans in the stands was, it appears to be higher than the 413 fans the Yankees attracted on Sept. 22, 1966. That’s the franchise record for lowest attendance, and it occurred under similar circumstances as Monday’s game—at the end of a lost season on a dreary day after an unrelenting rain storm.
