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 against the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday.
Large swaths of seats, especially in the upper deck, sat empty while right-hander AJ Blumbaugh delivered the game’s first pitch at 4:10 p.m.
The bottom two levels were much more filled 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.
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.
All those empty seats are a rare sight in a ballpark 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.
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.
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