I have been following the Texas Rangers for several years and have noticed (via TV) similar at both home and away games — stadiums with thousands of empty seats. That has included weekday and weekend and night games.
I surmise that they get their income from the networks who broadcast the games.
Of course, when teams are playing well and having a winning season, they do have greater attendance for home games.
The lower fan attendance could also be due to massive overload. They play 160+ games per season which is basically 6 games per week.
They played 162 games when Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, and Roberto Clemente graced the field. I don’t recall anyone thinking the season was too long back then.
Baseball has no personality, no lore, no announcers, and costs way too much for the crappy product it displays.
If one reviews average MLB attendance figures over the past century, many teams did not break averages of 10,000 tickets per game and then later 20,000 tickets per game until recent decades. Earlier decades typically had far lower attendance for most teams. So much of the history of MLB is of playing to mostly empty or half-empty stadiums, until recent decades when some (by no means all) teams got their averages up to 30K or even 40K per game. For instance, when the Baltimore Orioles had their tremendous teams in the early 1970s, they averaged only around 12,000 tickets per game.... this during a period when they had a bunch of future Hall of Fame players and went to the World Series 5 out of 6 years!!
http://www.baseball-almanac.com/teams/baltatte.shtml