Well, the Hershey Bears’ season ended last night with a loss.
I can hardly complain; two finals in two years is still pretty good. Two years in a row, I got to see them play in June (I supposed it’s too late now for me to whine about the parking lot flood at the Giant Center last Friday. Suffice it to say, it’s overly-engineered in the worst way, and it has only gotten worse.). And this year, I got the pleasure of knowing that they were the last professional team in the world playing this season. Pretty cool.
Now, I am in baseball mode.
But what if there was a baseball game and no one came?
I took in my second professional game of the season yesterday afternoon in Camden.
Where are the fans?
You’re looking at them!
By my unofficial count, I was one of 22 spectators there, including players’ families. And that’s exactly why I went!
See, the independent (unaffiliated) Atlantic League of Professional Baseball awarded an expansion team to York, Pennsylvania, this year. The York Revolution (so named because York was, however briefly, a Revoluation-era capital of the US) were supposed to move into their home stadium in York last month, but construction delays meant their stadium won’t be ready until mid-June.
So, with a month of baseball scheduled to play and without a stadium, the team arranged to play their first 11 “home” games 105 miles away from their home city. For May and early June, York’s “home” is Campbell’s Field in Camden, NJ.
In the Atlantic League, an average ticket costs about $8, and crowds of 6,000 fans aren’t unheard of, although 4,500 is probably about average. The quality of play is good; many of the players are former major-leaguers. But a largely unadvertised mid-week, mid-afternoon game, early in the season played at a neutral site between two teams that have never had a home following just doesn’t hold that much appeal around here. Tickets were only $3, and even still, I only counted 22 of us there.
In a way, I was amazed that they had tickets at all. With the stadium filled to about .3% of capacity, we were all free to roam around. It was fun to watch the game from multiple angles, and a couple of young kids collected literally dozens of foul balls. Of course, aside from the game, there wasn’t all that much else to see (aside from the luxury box I found my way into–Shhh! Don’t tell!); all of the concession stands were closed, and I think there were more people from the off-hours cleaning crew in the park than there were fans. Even still, I have to hand it to the teams for actually running it like the professional game it is. In addition to having tickets, they actually had a professional PA announcer, radio broadcast team, a national anthem, and music between innings.
(Does anyone remember the Delaware Stars of the old, ill-conceived Maryland Fall Baseball Leauge? This kind of reminded me of that–a real game played before a deserted stadium. I never made it up to see the old Lehigh Valley Black Diamonds before they became the Road Warriors, but I imagine this was like their games.)
There is definitely something to say for being part of an energetic, sold-out crowd. But every once in a while, being part of a laughably small crowd can be an interesting novelty.
All in all, a fun, quirky afternoon. 
Filed under: Baseball, Ice hockey, Life, Posts with Pictures, Sports, Stadiums Tagged: | Atlantic League, Campbell's Field, York Revolution
