Pirates president responds to shockingly low PNC Park attendance

Despite winning two recent games against the Nationals (yay), the Pittsburgh Pirates find themselves sitting at the bottom of their division with an 8-13 record entering Saturday's slate of MLB action. In fairness, the team is actually 6-5 so far at home, but to this point has done little to entice fans to attend games at PNC Park.

As per Baseball Reference, the Pirates are averaging 15,535 fans per contest through 10 games, which is the fourth-lowest average in the Majors. However, based on the response to this from team president Travis Williams, he doesn't seem to be particularly worried:

Low attendance is nothing new for the Pirates

Now, on a surface level this seems fair enough, because attendances do usually improve with the weather for teams from cold weather baseball cities. However, you can't help wondering if Williams is being a little bit too relaxed, given low attendances are not exactly a new phenomena in Pittsburgh.

Year after year, the Pirates have found themselves lingering at the wrong end of the attendance table in the Majors: 2024 - 21,239 (25th), 2023 - 20,131 (25th), 2022 - 15,524 (27th), 2021 - 10,611 (25th). Now yes, some of those figures were undoubtedly impacted by the COVID-19 fallout, but even in the lead-up to the pandemic, there were attendance issues in Pittsburgh.

Pirates are the worst team in the Majors over the past 25 years

This is what happens, though, when you have a team with a proud tradition, but just three playoff appearances since 1992 and, as we wrote about last month, was named by The Athletic as the worst MLB franchise of the 21st century.

It's pretty damning for Williams specifically, with the Pirates having a losing record each year and not finishing higher than fourth in their division since he took over in October 2019.

We can appreciate the sentiment that Williams' confidence comes from a rotation which includes the sensational Paul Skenes and 2023 All-Star Mitch Keller, and with top-rated prospect Bubba Chandler on the way. Although this doesn't matter much if the organization won't spend money, which ESPN's Jeff Passan criticized them for during an appearance on Baseball Today with Chris Rose:

You would like to think at some point Williams will acknowledge not spending money equals continuing to have losing seasons and low attendances inside PNC Park. Instead, if he sticks with insisting better weather alone will result in more wins and more people going to games then, as Passan indicates, the Pirates really are insulting the fans.

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