The Phillies’ Totally Bullshit Sellout Streak is Over

Pictured: an average day at CBP this season

Remember the other day when I said the Phillies were shamelessly begging fans to keep coming so they could keep their highly-touted sellout streak alive?

Yeah, it didn’t work.

During Monday night’s tilt against the Braves, the fourth-place (!!!) Phillies announced an attendance of 41,665,  well below their minimum-sellout threshold of 43,900. What do I mean minimum? The team has a sliding minimum for what they consider a sellout. Sometime it’s 43,900, sometimes it’s 44,100. It’s not clear why the numbers change, but it’s clear that the attendance numbers they’ve been announcing haven’t reflected reality for a while now.

If you’ve been to a game at CBP since, oh, May you’ve known this was coming: there have been huge swaths of empty seats in the upper decks and the crowds that do show up take their time getting into their seats and are quick to leave them early when things are looking down.

In short, we’re getting back to what Phillies baseball is all about: hurling obscenities at an impotent home team from your seat in the middle of a completely empty section in the upper decks. It’s pretty great.

That said, an announced attendance of 41,000 is still damn good. Most teams in MLB would give their left arm for that kind of attendance.In fact, with an average of 44,600 tickets being sold each night, the Phillies lead the majors in average attendance this season. In case you’re curious, that’s good for 102% attendance. The first-place (!!!) Washington Nationals actually represent the major league median attendance, selling 29,600 tickets a night in their relatively new ballpark. If you’re curious, the Cleveland Indians are at the bottom of MLB selling an average of 20,486 tickets a night, which represents just 47% capacity of The Jake Progressive Field.

So, in conclusion, the sellout streak that we all knew was over is officially over, but it’s not really that big of a deal for the team because Philadelphians are still willing to financially support this baseball team. At least for now. With the white flag officially flying over this season, that attendance figure is sure to dwindle. The good news is that it’s totally a buyer’s market for tickets now on sites like StubHub. Oh, and if you’re a ticket seller? Well, my condolences.