Pirates Close Upper Deck Due to Minuscule Crowd During G-20

There is a perfect storm of sorts going on in Pittsburgh this week. The Pirates have lost 22 of their past 25 games (and are in the process of losing number 23 as I type this), which is the worst streak for the franchise since well before the turn of the 20th (not 21st) century. Meanwhile, the city is hosting the G-20 Summit, which has resulted in a huge spate of business and school closings in the downtown area as the city ratchets up security for the visiting heads of state.

The result is a crowd at Thursday afternoon's Pirates-Reds game that is so small, the entire upper deck at PNC Park is closed. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Dejan Kovacevic has some pictures of the empty park on his blog; he estimates that the actual attendance as the first pitch was thrown may have been below 200 people (UPDATE: apparently, attendance climbed during the game a bit to around 2,000, per both Kovacevic and MLB.com beat writer Jen Langosch)

Seventeen years of losing and global summits do not mix, apparently. I'm not sure I've ever seen a ballpark so empty. The picture of the parking lot is particularly striking; there are more cars parked around the building I work in than there are at PNC Park today, I think.

It's not fair to blame the Pirates entirely for this, because of the G-20, but this really is one of the sadder sights I've seen in baseball this year. PNC is a beautiful park, but it looks like a high school team is playing there with the size of that crowd. And making that comparison only invites jokes about the Pirates' level of play lately, which honestly hasn't seemed much better.