Want more from Front Office Sports
in your search results?
Attendance for MLB’s daytime playoff games remains a troubling issue, but the nature of the league’s broadcast operations makes a large-scale scheduling pivot unlikely.
The Braves drew an announced attendance of 30,127 for their wild card win over the Phillies on Tuesday afternoon at Truist Park. That figure is well below the ballpark’s capacity of 41,147, as well as Atlanta’s 2026 regular-season attendance average of 34,573.
A late-afternoon game on Tuesday at Houston’s Daikin Park between the White Sox and Astros showed an even more stark situation. The announced attendance of 34,011 was below the ballpark capacity of 40,963, and the vast swaths of empty seats suggested an actual turnout that was even lower.
Worse yet, Astros players complained about the turnout and fan boos after dropping the wild card series opener to Chicago, 6–3. Houston is in the 2026 playoffs with an 81-81 record, the worst full-season mark of any postseason entrant in MLB history.
“I’m not going to lie to you. I was pretty pissed off in the dugout when I came in, about the boos,” said Astros reliever Bennett Sousa. “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 Braves and Astros will again host daytime wild card games on Wednesday.
The issues involving those teams are hardly unique, though. Since the 2022 expansion of MLB playoff field to 12 teams, non-sellout crowds during the wild card round have been fairly common, particularly in historically weaker attendance markets such as Cleveland and Tampa. The Rays had MLB’s smallest non-pandemic playoff attendance for a 2023 wild card game against the Rangers, played on a weekday afternoon.
Conversely, nighttime wild card games played Tuesday in New York and San Diego featured full ballparks and plenty of fan energy, further boosted by convincing wins by the home team Yankees and Padres.
Historical Precedent
The attendance issues, past and present, have renewed calls among some fans and pundits to shift all of the first-round playoff games to primetime windows.
This was attempted in 1995, MLB’s first year with wild card teams, when all of the Division Series games on weekdays started at 8 p.m. ET and were televised on a regionalized basis. Fan outcry to the all-primetime plan was swift and severe, and was quickly abandoned for the 1996 season and beyond.
Instead, the staggered game starts provide a dedicated broadcast window for each wild card game, shown exclusively this year by NBC Sports.
Download the FOS App
The business of sports, in your pocket.
Scan the QR code to get the app now.
