NFL vs. MLB Attendance score: Chiefs 16,700, Royals 0

If NFL teams can play in front of fans, why can’t MLB teams do so too?

On Thursday night at Arrowhead Stadium, the Kansas City Chiefs will open the 2020 NFL season in front of about 16,700 actual human fans. About 12 hours later and a couple of thousand feet to the north, the Kansas City Royals will host the Pittsburgh Pirates. As it presently stands, that MLB game will be played in front of zero fans.

Why?

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The NFL’s Chiefs are one of several NFL teams that have announced plans to allow spectators – at a reduced number based on a percentage of stadium capacity – to their home games. Local officials have agreed to allow the 76,416 Arrowhead Stadium to be occupied to 22 percent capacity with guidelines governing precisely where people may sit, and how they will otherwise comport themselves.

Other NFL cities announcing plans to have fans at opening week home games include the Dallas Cowboys, the Miami Dolphins, and the Cleveland Browns, each of whose areas also features an MLB franchise. Yet none of the MLB teams in those cities has drawn up a plan to permit a reduced number of fans to attend their games.

Nothing underscores the differing approaches taken by football – both at the professional and college level – and baseball so effectively as this coming weekend. Across much of the country, not just the pros but college teams from the SEC, ACC, and Big 12 areas will open their seasons in front of actual human audiences.

There will be reduced attendance requirements and additional restrictions, to be sure. But fans will be welcomed. Just not in baseball.

By an accident of timing, the Truman Sports Complex on Kansas City’s eastern edge will be ground zero for this dichotomy Thursday and Friday. The two stadiums are literally just a few hundred yards apart, and the same governmental requirements apply to both. Legally, if fans can watch football in one stadium, then they can watch baseball in the other.

The listed capacity of Kauffman Stadium is 37,903. At 22 percent – the same formula local officials have already approved as safe for the Chiefs – that would permit about 8,400 fans to watch the Royals and Pirates play.

Yet the Royals have made no move to permit that to happen. Neither, in Dallas, Cleveland or Miami, have the Rangers, Indians, or Marlins.

Why haven’t MLB teams taken the same initiative as NLF teams?

MLB execs have stood mum on the question of fans in the season’s waning days, almost as if the topic is unimportant. In the absence of any clarity, the best guess is that MLB sees a competitive balance issue in allowing some teams to play in front of fans when other teams are barred by local regulation from doing so.

Indeed, there have been whispers that execs on some NFL teams are ticked about the reticence of commissioner Roger Goodell to prohibit the Chiefs, Cowboys, Dolphins, and Browns from playing in front of fans on the premise of competitive balance.

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The far better argument flows in the opposite direction. Why should fans in one area be penalized because conditions prevent fans in a separate area from attending games played within that separate area?

If the rule is that no fans get in anywhere until fans can get in everywhere, then it’s not out of the question that MLB teams need to prepare themselves for a fanless 2021 as well. Who knows how long concerns about the pandemic may linger in nearly two dozen distinct geographic locals? Is the game prepared to bet its future that COVID will disappear over the coming winter?

There is a separate and, for baseball, potentially more troubling question. By their actions, NFL teams have stated that their goal as commercial entities is to permit as many fans as is possible to access their games at the earliest possible date. MLB appears to be taking the opposite approach, signaling that the desires of fans to attend games are not an especially high priority for them.

In an age where MLB is struggling mightily to retain as much of its diminishing status as The National Pastime” as it possibly can, that’s a very bad message to be sending.