The Oakland Athletics are set to make the move to Las Vegas soon. And this, along with their team’s rough performance for the past few seasons, has led to an embarrassing number of fans showing up for their first home series of the year.
For the team’s first game of the season against the Cleveland Guardians on Thursday, 13,522 fans piled into the Oakland Coliseum. For reference, the Athletics had nearly double this attendance for their Opening Day game last season, with 26,805 fans coming to that game.
Things got even worse for their game on Friday, the second game of their four-game set against the Guardians. Just 3,937 fans attended that game, a truly shocking number of fans for a professional baseball game.
Yep, you read that correctly. Just 3,937 fans in a stadium that holds up to 63,000 people at a maximum capacity. This means that just six percent of the entire stadium was full for this game, which was quite evident when you look at pictures of the stadium for the game.
Announced attendance tonight in Oakland for game 2 of the A’s season
3,837 people pic.twitter.com/Kyuc5aSXU6
— Al Scott (@AlScott1998) March 30, 2024
The Athletics are expected to be pretty bad again this season. That is no secret. But even the worst of teams can usually bring in far more fans than this A’s team is currently getting.
It obviously begs the question, why are fans opting not to go to these games? Well, Athletics fans, especially those in Oakland, are not too happy about the team’s impending move to Las Vegas. And to begin the season, there has been a huge portion of fans that are actively boycotting the team’s games.
Many fans were seen outside the stadium instead of inside of it, showing off signs that proclaimed that A’s owner John Fisher should “sell the team”.
"We don’t want to give (John) Fisher our money for taking our team and he doesn’t deserve another dollar." A's fans boycott Opening Night at the Oakland Coliseum @kcranews pic.twitter.com/G1gueCzoCT
— Michelle Dapper (@KCRAdapper) March 29, 2024
Early on, the boycott appears to be working, as these current attendance numbers are surely quite disastrous for the A’s organization.
It’s certainly commendable that the A’s fans appear to be dedicated to this cause. And only time will tell whether fans eventually fold and begin to attend more games later on in the season.
About Reice Shipley
Reice Shipley is a staff writer for Comeback Media that graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in Sports Media. He previously worked at Barrett Sports Media and is a fan of all things Syracuse sports.