When the Marlins are in town, the Astros will basically pay you to come to the ballpark.

The Houston Astros are clawing their way back into the AL playoff race after a highly uncharacteristic bad start to the 2024 season. Entering Tuesday, the Astros are 46-44, two games out of the AL West lead and 3.5 games back of the third and final wild card spot. They will now face the Miami Marlins.

And while the Astros have turned their season around, it’s just been misery piled upon misery for the Marlins. They started the season bad and have made that the theme of 2024 for Miami up until now. They come into the series in Houston 26 games under .500 and fast-tracked toward a fire sale at the trade deadline.

If you’re an Astros fan, that’s probably not the highly competitive series that you would want to go see in Minute Maid Park, right? Sure, you might ensure that it’ll be a win for the home team but is that still worth paying regular price for tickets? Even the organization doesn’t think so.

Astros pull out near-free tickets to get fans to come watch series vs. Marlins

The Astros announced a ridiculously dirt-cheap promotion this week for the Marlins series that basically equates to the tank of gas or Uber ride to the ballpark being five times more expensive than the night at the ballpark. For $5, fans can get tickets to attend Astros-Marlins and it also happens to be $1 hot dog night as well — at least for Tuesday’s game.

For $10, you can attend a major league game and have to be rolled out of your seat after eating five hot dogs. Such is life when the Marlins come to town.

It’s truly a sad state of affairs when it comes to the Marlins. This is a team that made the playoffs just last season and is now bottoming out again — an unfortunate trend for an organization that, even in their brief history, we’ve seen have tremendous amounts of success.

The state of this team isn’t just an insult to Marlins fans. It also leads to something like this, where opposing teams almost have to give away tickets (and concessions) in order to get people and fans to have even a remote interest of wanting to watch Miami play.

And it’s only going to get worse. The Marlins are expected to trade the likes of Jazz Chisholm Jr., Josh Bell, Tanner Scott and more before the July 30 trade deadline, which will only make this more of a Major League-esque roster rather than a major-league roster.

But hey, if I were in Houston, I’d be at the ballpark for a $10 ticket-plus-meal combo whenever they offered it, even if the Astros were playing a little-league team.