HOUSTON — The crowd at Daikin Park was surprisingly sparse as the Houston Astros — baseball’s first division winner with a .500 or worse record — opened their wild-card series with a 6-3 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday.
Large swaths of seats, especially in the upper deck, sat empty while right-hander AJ Blubaugh delivered the game’s first pitch at 4:10 p.m. The bottom two levels were much fuller than the upper deck, but many seats in the lower two decks were also empty.
The announced attendance was 34,011, in a park with a capacity of 40,963.
All those empty seats are a rare sight in a stadium that is normally packed for the postseason. And some of the fans that did show up weren’t too happy with the performance of the home team with boos raining down on the Astros in the first and second innings as they fell behind 3-0.
“It’s extremely frustrating as a home player,” first baseman Christian Walker told The Athletic. “We’re here, playing at home; we need cheers. We need energy. We don’t need boos. What purpose does that serve in that moment? Whatever fans are feeling, we’re feeling it tenfold. We’re the ones out there. We’re the ones in the fight. We worked our butts off this whole season to put ourselves in this spot, and for guys to get booed, it’s frustrating.”
Reliever Bennett Sousa was subjected to some boos after spiking two breaking pitches in the seventh inning.
“The fans here are definitely spoiled with a lot of ALCS and World Series runs, and we have to earn that right to bring this team back to that position,” Sousa told The Athletic. “That being said, when this team was in their first [playoff] series 10 years ago, Minute Maid Park was probably packed.
“It makes a big difference. If we were in Chicago, it’d probably be loud as s—.”
Major League Baseball has previously had trouble filling stadiums for some afternoon games in the wild-card round.
When Cleveland hosted Detroit last year, the series opener started at 1:08 p.m. with 26,186 in attendance. All three games in that series were played in front of fewer than 30,000 fans.
The Tampa Bay Rays drew just 19,704 for an ALWCS opener against Texas in 2023 that started at 3:08 p.m., the lowest attendance for a non-COVID MLB postseason game since the 1919 World Series.
Houston returned to the playoffs after missing out last year despite finishing 81-81. It’s the first time a team made the postseason without a winning record in a non-shortened season.
The Astros averaged 30,519 fans per game during the regular season, which ranked 14th in the majors.
Houston fought through an injury-plagued season to reach the playoffs for the ninth time in 10 years. The Astros reached the American League Championship Series seven straight times from 2017-23 and advanced to the World Series four times, winning championships in 2017 and 2022.
“As a team and as a staff, we know how we feel about our guys. And if that’s felt differently from the outside — that’s OK. We can live with that,” Sousa said. “But as a team, we know that we lay it on the line every day. We’ve been working our ass off.
“… I’m not going to lie to you, I was pretty pissed off in the dugout when I came in, about the boos. This team has laid a lot on the line to be in this position to give the fans a playoff game — a playoff series. We want their support.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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