205 Drop: Top 10 moves to increase MLB attendance

Today's snarky list is here. Today's overly long rumination on today's list is below. Who said that we're a wildly unpopular sports blog due to our basic contempt for humanity? At least, who said that out loud?

Today, I'd like to say a word in defense of light crowds at the old ball yard. When I was a partial year season ticket holder for the A's during the stint in NoCal, I took the Shooter Child (now the Shooter Eldest) to about 20 games a year, and in that mix along with the de rigeur fireworks shows were a fairly strong number of mid-week night games where the crowds were fairly, shall we say, intimate. We preferred them, on many levels, to the games where Yankee Fan and Red Sox Fan invaded the park by the thousands to tell us how much of a craphole it was. (Thanks! We hadn't noticed!)

Part of that was simply wanting to avoid Yankee Fan and Red Sox Fan -- honestly, you people are worse on the road than you are at home -- but mostly, it was because baseball without a crushing crowd has its own charms. You can get to a bathroom or concession stand without a major commitment, for one. You don't have to step over people to tend to the needs of your small child, for another. If the person near you has to provide an R-rated soundtrack to the game, you can also just plain move. It's all to the good.

There's also just a more relaxed air to the whole thing. Baseball, on some very basic level, should just not be taken all that seriously. It's the same game that you see played by children without adult supervision, after all, and even if it doesn't have that whole Air of The Drama when the crowds are small, it's still a pretty good game, especially in person. You can relax watching it. Maybe help a kid with the coloring. Savor the taste of that only good at the yard hot dog, because it's only at the yard that you're actually not multi-tasking and grinding on so many fronts that you can, you know, actually taste it.

So to all of the teams that are taking it on the chin at the turnstile, I wish you nothing but continued challenges. And to the rest of us who just love the game, rather than all of the things that you have to put up with around the game... well, good seats available. And maybe, just maybe, not enough security people around to give a damn when we take that mid-game free seat upgrade.