A habit, not a referendum
Because baseball is played almost daily for months, attending a game is closer to a summer ritual than a response to a single result. People go with friends, bring children, mark a birthday — reasons that exist regardless of whether the team is above or below where it wants to be in the standings.
Judging that attendance purely as an endorsement of the team's performance misreads what most of the evening was actually for. The scoreboard matters, but it is rarely the whole reason anyone bought a ticket in July.
What the ballpark offers beyond the score
A ballpark on a warm evening offers something a highlight package cannot: the unhurried texture of the sport itself, conversation between pitches, the small rituals of a crowd that has done this many times before. None of that depends on the team winning, and a lot of it is genuinely better when the stakes are low enough to relax into.
This is not unique to struggling teams, but it becomes more visible then, because it is the part of the experience left standing once the drama of contention is removed.
Loyalty misjudged
It is easy, from outside, to treat continued attendance during a poor season as either gullibility or low standards. I think that is a category error. The habit was never solely a bet on outcomes; it was a relationship with a place and a summer that outlives any individual season's results.
None of this excuses a franchise from trying to field a competitive team, and fans are right to demand that effort. But the persistence of attendance through a bad year is not evidence that nobody minded. It is evidence that the sport gives people more than one thing to show up for.