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Let's hope we never see this again: the cardboard cutouts outnumbering flesh and blood fans when the Blue Jays hosted the Phillies last May in Dunedin.

Another 2021 travel stop was Syracuse, where I caught a July 29th minor league counterpart of the Subway Series with the Triple A Mets hosting the Yankees' Scranton-Wilkes Barre RailRiders.
Over the weekend, news broke that the Braves were trying to sign franchise mainstay Freddie Freeman to a new contract before the December 1st deadline. Of course, the hangup is money. According to USA Today, the 12 year veteran is looking for a $200 million deal; the Braves latest offer was about $65 million less...


And our Wayback of the Week:
From late September 1981, the Yankees host the Orioles at the original/renovated Stadium just a month after action resumed after the mid-season strike.
This was clearly a bad time for baseball. Even though the Yankees were guaranteed a spot in the expanded playoffs by finishing first in the AL East before the strike, notice how sparse the attendance is.
Feeling frustrated by the strike, many fans chose not to attend games the rest of that year. Attendance for this game was announced as over 30,000, but those were tickets sold and not necessarily tickets used. Maybe that's a warning to both owners and players to work out something before March, so that the 2022 season starts as scheduled without risking the chance to alienate more of the game's most loyal fans.

 

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