Through the first six weeks of the 2013 season, the Dodgers have enjoyed a handful of sellouts at Dodger Stadium, and aside from Opening Day, every one of these sellouts has occurred on stadium giveaway games, or “SGA” as they are referred to on eBay (where many of the items show up for sale the next day). Without question, bobble heads are by far the most popular SGA items, although the Dodger sweatshirts and “Hello Kitty” fleece blankets recently given away were also extremely popular and brought with them sellout crowds.

Unfortunately, when you take away Opening Day and the SGA games and you throw in a hopelessly lost last place team, attendance at Dodger Stadium thus far this season is reminiscent of the McCourt boycott days.

Every time the Dodgers travel to AT&T Park to take on the hated Giants, we have to endure the never-ending big deal that the Giants make about their zillionth consecutive sellout. Aside from the fact that nobody cares about the Giants’ sellouts (especially Dodger fans watching the games on TV), the truth of the matter is that their 42,000-ish sellout crowds wouldn’t even be considered a large crowd at Dodger Stadium, where a sellout consists of (approximately) 56,000 fans.

All of this said, Tuesday night’s game against the division rival Arizona Diamondbacks was a SGA night (an attractive “A Whole New Blue” T-shirt), yet the announced attendance of 33,611 was nowhere near a sellout; in fact, it wasn’t even close. (Note: Sporting venues are now permitted to use the number of tickets sold as their “official” attendance rather than the actual number of fannies in the seats ). My best guess would put Tuesday night’s actual attendance at maybe 25,000.

There were more giveaway T-Shirts at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday night than there were fans to give them to.
(Photo courtesy of Dodgers.com)

Follow that up with Wednesday night’s non-SGA game (but was a Kershday –  self explanatory) which drew an announced crowd of 31,512 but I can assure you was no more than 20,000, and you can see that the Dodgers are not only having a serious problems between the lines, but outside of them as well.

This is what the Dodger Stadium crowd looked like on Wednesday evening 10 minutes before Clayton Kershaw’s first pitch. (Photo credit – Ron Cervenka)

Why the disparity between 31,512 and 20,000? The answer to that is actually quite simple.

Shortly after Opening Day, Dodger President and CEO Stan Kasten announced that they had sold an all-time record 31,000 season tickets. As such, even if there were only a hundred people actually in attendance, the announced attendance will always be at least 31,000.

Needless to say, drawing 25,000 actual fans on a SGA night and then drawing 20,000 actual fans when the best left-hander in the game since Sandy Koufax is pitching has got to be a concern for the new Dodger ownership group – a huge concern.

Now I can certainly understand why there might be a lower than normal attendance if the Lakers and Kings were playing at nearby Staples Center in the NBA and Stanley Cup playoffs, but the Lakers have been long since eliminated and the Kings did not play on Tuesday night and were on the road on Wednesday night, so scratch that excuse.

This can mean only one thing – Dodger fans are absolutely disgusted with the Dodgers and have no desire to come out to Dodger Stadium and waste their hard-earned money to watch a pathetic last place team – regardless of stadium giveaways and regardless of who is on the mound – it’s as simple as that.

Even though the Dodgers have already made their money on the 31,000 season tickets sold, the 11,000 difference in actual number of fans at the games is costing the Dodgers a boatload of money in lost revenue. Using a very conservative estimate that each of these 11,000 fans buys one Dodger Dog and one small soda, that alone is $110,000 in lost revenue – and this isn’t even counting lost revenue for beer, peanuts, ice cream, souvenirs, merchandise and parking. When all of these are taken into consideration, the amount of lost revenue is quite possibly over a million dollars every day.

With the Dodgers now dangerously close to having the worst record in all of baseball, you can bet that Mark Walter, Stan Kasten, Magic Johnson and the rest of the Guggenheim Baseball Management group are extremely angry with the product on the field – a product that they spent a quarter of a billion dollars on and a product that they expect to win a World Championship.

I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see GBM make some personnel changes within the next week or so; in fact I would be quite surprised if they didn’t. And when a struggling baseball team makes personnel changes, the changes almost always involve the manager, general manager and/or the coaching staff. Are such firings fair or justified? Usually not, but something has to change and this is usually where the first changes are made.

I also have to believe that in order to save their jobs, Ned Colletti and Don Mattingly are willing to roll the dice by bringing up young players within the Dodger farm system that will put those proverbial fannies in the seats at Dodger Stadium – and this would most certainly include Yasiel Puig and probably Zach Lee, among others – this in spite of the fact that these young players might not yet be MLB ready (although I would argue that Puig is).

Regardless of what it is that needs to be done to right the Dodgers ship you can count on one thing – the Dodgers are in desperate times and they need to take desperate measures.