Seating (at at Tropicana Field) will be limited to around 7,000 per game

Sometimes, the jokes really do write themselves.

In 2019 they had 4 home games under 7K attendance. Their highest home gate was just over 25k, with an average of 14.5.

They FINALLY have a chance to catch up with the financial juggernauts in their division!

How will you be able to tell the policy has changed?

Funny thing is in those 4 games with under 7k in 2019 they won all 4. They also had 2 under 7k in Miami (so much for local rivals) that they won as well. Guess the Rays like playing in as empty a park as possible (might explain them getting to the World Series in 2020)

one of the worst venues in baseball.

when i lived in tampa, a blessedly brief interlude, i went to a couple of games.

the first one i went to, it started raining in the middle innings. no problem, i thought. there's a dome. it looked like a cheap plastic skylight the owner never cleaned, but it covered the stadium.

then it rained harder. and harder. it got so noisy i could barely hear my friend talking.

then the storm knocked out the power. no lights. so we had a delay of game due to rain, in a domed stadium.

that's tropicana field.

This will be complicated for the owners. If you were only going to let in 7k, you’d want to smush them together behind home plate and close down food service and bathrooms in other areas. Fewer cleaning people, fewer concessions, fewer ushers, less of everything . But covid forces you to use whole ballpark

My conclusion is it’s never been a better time to attend games. Got the whole place to yourself.

It would be like games in Cleveland in the mid 80's - they were terrible and no one came. Thus the movie Major League being placed there. In 1985 they averaged 8k a game. In a 70k+ seat stadium. Looked crazy on TV and can just imagine what it was like in person.

Philly in the late 90s had a similar situation. Spring time games were sparsely attended and there wasn't a ton of season ticket holders/ticket scalpers hogging up tickets. So I'd get done with work and decide I want to go to that day's game. Look up the game and see that tickets right behind home plate were still available an hour before the game and at 22.50. Leave for the have about 20 minutes before first pitch, breeze into the parking lot with no hassle, and be in my seat with a beer and a hot dog before first pitch. They'd announce attendance of something like 14000 but there was no way that 14000 showed up.

In 1985 they averaged 8k a game. In a 70k+ seat stadium. Looked crazy on TV and can just imagine what it was like in person.

Imagine no more!

My conclusion is it’s never been a better time to attend games.

If you discount that whole "fear of death" thing.

Got the whole place to yourself.

The ballpark, maybe. The intensive care unit, not so much.

[11] Why can't you have a conversation about the possibility that the Covid death tolls are being wildly exaggerated by the media? A lot of people believe that the numbers are being faked, but just raising the possibility makes somebody cast as a tin foil hat conspiracy theorist. Now I'm not saying the death tolls aren't real; I'm just saying that it's possible and people who want more government control in our lives would have incentives to do so. But we can't even get agreement that hospitals need to be more transparent about how they record deaths!

#12 Simple. You have to back up and also explain the increase in excess deaths. Until you can address that issue adequately you fall into the tinfol nuttery camp.

Joyful Calculus Instructor Posted: January 17, 2021 at 04:15 PM (#6000203)

[11] Why can't you have a conversation about the possibility that the Covid death tolls are being wildly exaggerated by the media

- sigh

where to begin, seeing as how i disremember you as a Q person

1 - do you believe that the hospitals are overflowing and that ambulances are waiting hours in line to get a person to even the ER doc? i guess if you think the pics are fake and the HCWs are lying theres nowhere to go

2 - do you believe that a lot of people are dying of something that is not homicide or suicide, more than usual? i mean, the morgues are insanely backed up. if you disbelieve that, well, we can stop there

3 - if you do actually believe that there are all these dead people, what is it they died from? i mean, if not from covid?

and, btw, i do know some rich White people who have died/are dying from covid as i type this. most of them were under 65 and had no medical problems, btw. and even the right wing families are not pretending that they don't have covid, but instead something from outer space or whoknowswhat

if anything i would bet that we as a country really have UNDERcounted covid deaths, especially last winter/spring

it's still really bad here in yewstin - the bars are all open calling themselves "restaurants" although theres not a plate in sight if you go in there and theres all these drunk idiots without masks. but the worst is all the people who have decided that their friends/relatives are "good people" so they couldn't possibly have it cuz they got no symptoms/fever and they have these small parties and whaddaya know, someone DID have it and gave it to at least 1 other person who spread it around (sounds like how people decide if someone got a STD. seriously)

and there are some skoolz open with some kids going there and kids get it and bring it home too. just because they are not getting real too sick with it don't mean they don't get it. or pass it on

Further to my #13, most people who bring up the the overcount possibility aren't arguing in good faith.

And like BBC I don't recall you ever showing signs of being a conspiracy advocate so I'm willing to assume you're interested in a good faith discussion.

I'd say it pre-supposes a monolith "they". A vast conspiracy to inflate numbers without anybody speaking out. I can't imagine anybody who's ever been around any kind of policy making body would believe that a big conspiracy could be organized without word leaking out.

In the end, Covid deaths are counted in the same way flu deaths have always been counted. And we use excess deaths as a sanity check against those numbers. Which establishes pretty clearly that the official numbers are a pretty substantial undercount.

Most people know a nurse or doctor that would have to be part of the vast conspiracy and are not. And if you insinuate that they are, the response will usually be spirited. (In fact I'd like to be present if someone pressed my cousin the charge nurse on this. She would actually punch anyone.)

I'd say it pre-supposes a monolith "they". A vast conspiracy to inflate numbers without anybody speaking out. I can't imagine anybody who's ever been around any kind of policy making body would believe that a big conspiracy could be organized without word leaking out.


There's no conspiracy, but there's an economic reality. The Federal Gov't is reimbursing hospitals for all COVID cases, so if someone has COVID, or plausibly looks like they have it, and they die from something else, it's being called COVID to maximize reimbursement. Especially if they have no insurance, or insurance that pays less.

I'm not saying there's a vast over-counting of deaths, but there's certainly some. My uncle fell into this camp. He had Parkinsons, and several other conditions, broke his hip, went into the hospital caught COVID, but never showed any real symptoms. He was basically asymptomatic, but couldn't shake the virus given his terrible health. When he died it was called COVID, though that was at most a minor factor.

#17 Swings and roundabouts though Snapper. This kind of thing is the reason you cross-check against excess deaths.

And while some might be debatable there are all sorts that aren't reported as Covid related because the person in question has never been tested and it's just not that important after a person's dead.

What's the actual point? You've got hundreds of thousands of bodies and you're quibbling about a handful. Why?

#15 In the end, Covid deaths are counted in the same way flu deaths have always been counted. And we use excess deaths as a sanity check against those numbers. Which establishes pretty clearly that the official numbers are a pretty substantial undercount.

Not really.

The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.

There is some logic behind the CDC’s methods. There are, of course, some flu deaths that are missed, because not everyone who contracts the flu gets a flu test. But there are little data to support the CDC’s assumption that the number of people who die of flu each year is on average six times greater than the number of flu deaths that are actually confirmed. In fact, in the fine print, the CDC’s flu numbers also include pneumonia deaths.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/

Back in the olden days when flu was as close as we came to a threat, then we used numbers to scare and exaggerate a bit for effect. Now that there's a real threat I'll get out there and agree with you that we need to clean up the reporting, but probably not in the way you'd like me to.

#20 Again, we've got the excess deaths as a sanity check to any given method. They're way up this year -- well beyond what's reported for Covid deaths.

snapper

he DID die of covid, unless he died of something else, which it doesn't sound like he did because if he didn't have symptoms, there wouldn't be nothing to shake. just because you didn't go INTO the hospitatl with covid doesn't mean you can't catch it in there and it doesn't kill you. all kinds of people die every year from something they caugfht AFTER they went into the hospitatl

Um, before we go too far down this road, I’m pretty sure post 11 was a satire of the previous poster’s desire for a “rational conversation” about how the election results might be fraudulent.

Um, before we go too far down this road, I’m pretty sure post 11 was a satire of the previous poster’s desire for a “rational conversation” about how the election results might be fraudulent.

that was my take as well

in satire, the audience ultimately determines what is too subtle

[NARRATOR: "It was too subtle."]

(plus I don't really see post 11 as an ideal launch for this bit)

#23 Hope so. Too subtle for me though. The poster did give me pause and I should have considered that further.

12 was obviously meant to make fun of rMC.

Yes, sorry, I meant to refer to post 12, not post 11.

Well done with 12, Gags. I don't know if it's on par with your early hip hop work, but I appreciate the subtlety.