Astros frustrated by boos from sparse crowd during wild-card opener - ESPN

HOUSTON — The crowd at Daikin Park was surprisingly sparse as the Houston Astros — baseball's first division winner with a .500 or worse record — opened their wild-card series with a 6-3 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday.

Large swaths of seats, especially in the upper deck, sat empty while right-hander AJ Blubaugh delivered the game's first pitch at 4:10 p.m. The bottom two levels were much fuller than the upper deck, but many seats in the lower two decks were also empty.

The announced attendance was 34,011, in a park with a capacity of 40,963.

All those empty seats are a rare sight in a stadium that is normally packed for the postseason. And some of the fans that did show up weren't too happy with the performance of the home team with boos raining down on the Astros in the first and second innings as they fell behind 3-0.

«It's extremely frustrating as a home player,» first baseman Christian Walker told The Athletic. «We're here, playing at home; we need cheers. We need energy. We don't need boos. What purpose does that serve in that moment? Whatever fans are feeling, we're feeling it tenfold. We're the ones out there. We're the ones in the fight. We worked our butts off this whole season to put ourselves in this spot, and for guys to get booed, it's frustrating.»

Reliever Bennett Sousa was subjected to some boos after spiking two breaking pitches in the seventh inning.

«This team has laid a lot on the line to be in this position to give the fans a playoff game — a playoff series,» Sousa told The Athletic. «We want their support.»

Major League Baseball has previously had trouble filling stadiums for some afternoon games in the wild-card round. When Cleveland hosted Detroit last year, the series opener started at