Trailing 5-0 on Wednesday night, the Baltimore Orioles scored nine runs in the eighth inning and held on to win 9-8 over the Kansas City Royals. For an Orioles team that entered Wednesday with the fewest wins (44) in Major League Baseball, this inning was a rather stunning development.
REWIND ⏪ pic.twitter.com/BnxDzpeVod
— Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles) September 9, 2021
However, not very many people were on hand to see it. In fact, the crazy inning and comeback featured literally the lowest attendance in Camden Yards history, at least if we remove capacity restrictions (like 2020 and early 2021 due to COVID-19, of course).
One night after a record-low attendance of 4,981, Camden Yards had an even lower announced attendance on Wednesday night: 4,965.
The Orioles announced tonight’s attendance as 4,965. Last night’s attendance was the lowest for a game without capacity restrictions at 4,891 in the history of Camden Yards. Tonight’s is the new record. Here’s what it looked like in the third inning. pic.twitter.com/aJPyUmHzkg
— Jon Meoli (@JonMeoli) September 9, 2021
4,965 announced attendance tonight. Another new low for Camden Yards. https://t.co/merNzl1RU0
— John Ourand (@Ourand_SBJ) September 9, 2021
Yikes.
But, hey- is it really surprising that people aren’t in a hurry to pay money to watch a 44-win team face a 62-win team in September? Of course not. Still, it has to be pretty alarming to the Baltimore ownership and front office.
The Orioles “improve” to 45-93 (a .326 winning percentage), after going 25-35 (.417) in 2020, 54-108 (.333) in 2019, and 47-115 (.290) in 2018. Their fans have seemingly, and understandably, had enough.
Yes, Baltimore has arguably the best farm system in baseball right now, but that’s also A) a result of how putrid the team has been for years and B) largely due to one player (top prospect Adley Rutschmnn). If the Orioles don’t make significant improvements to their big-league product soon, there will likely be many more embarrassing attendance figures like the last two games.
