Fan confidence hits a new season low

Welcome to SB Nation FanPulse, a survey of fans across MLB. Each week, we send 30 polls to plugged in fans from each team. Red Sox fans, sign up HERE to join FanPulse.

Fan Confidence hits a new low

This season has been a drag, particularly coming off the tremendous high that was last season. The expectations for 2019 were so high, and even if they didn’t repeat it seemed impossible that they wouldn’t at least be competitive. Through it all, this team is still right in the thick of the playoff race. It sure doesn’t feel that way, though. After Saturday’s absurd loss to the Yankees in London, the Red Sox fell all the way back to ten games out of the division. They are also a full two games behind the Rangers in the wildcard race, so even making the postseason is far from a sure thing. It seems like every time it appears this Red Sox team is heading in the right direction they take a massive and disappointing step back. With all of this in mind, it’s not terribly surprising that in the latest fan confidence poll we saw the worst results of the year. Only 40 percent of fans said they were confident in the team’s direction, a mark worse than all but four (Tigers, Mets, Pirates, Phillies) teams.

For what it’s worth, confidence in manager Alex Cora continues to hold steady at 77 percent. He has stayed between 74 and 84 percent for six straight weeks.

Almost all fans think owners should pay for stadiums

I mean, duh, right? Thinking anything else is straight-up bananas. Anyway, with the news that ended up being untrue that the Rays were going to split time between Tampa and Montreal, it got people talking about new stadiums. You see, that split time plan was a transparent ploy to scare Tampa into paying for a new stadium, and to signal to Montreal that they should get ready to build a stadium up in Canada. It should go without saying that owners should be paying for these stadiums, right? It’s a little more complicated than it just being a simple binary proposition, but boiled down to its most simplistic form the answer is obvious and 91 percent of the voters agreed with the obvious choice.