The steroid controversy about Bonds hadn't cut into fan interest in seeing him before knee surgery possibly ended his season.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Love him or hate him, baseball fans want to watch Barry Bonds play.

Commentators and sports radio callers have spent the off season decrying baseball's steroids scandal. Some have suggested that the controversy tarnishes the San Francisco slugger's single-season home run record, or his attempt to set the mark for homers in a career.

Despite the bombast, fans were apparently poised to turn out to watch him in huge numbers again this season. Now, they may not get a chance: Bonds announced this week that knee surgery could force him to miss the entire season.

So while surgery may take the most polarizing player out of public view for much if not all of this season, it has also removed baseball's biggest gate attraction.

The Giants themselves are in relatively good shape at the gate, even losing their best player. The team has 28,000 full-season ticket holders, equal to nearly three-quarters of the stadium.

Despite the steroids controversy, that number didn't see any noticeable drop off this off season, said club spokeswoman Staci Slaughter. Moreover, single-ticket sales are also roughly on pace to where they were this time a year ago.

"In San Francisco, we haven't experienced any of that (steroids backlash) to date in our ticket sales," she said. "The sales have trended where they were a year ago and two years ago and three years ago at this point in the season. We've gotten very few e-mails or phone calls from fans on the issue."

The Giants will likely fill well over 90 percent of their seats, even if their on-field performance suffers and their biggest fan attraction spends the year in physical therapy rather than the batter's box.

Part of that is that the Giants have done a very good job selling the experience of going to their new ballpark, SBC Park, which opened for the 2000 season. Slaughter said that the club is confident that its sales are not based solely around Bonds.

"We market all of our players and the experience of going to Giants games," she said.

Other popular new ballparks, however, quickly saw regular sellouts turn into empty seats after losing a popular gate attraction. In Baltimore, for example, attendance at Camden Yards swooned after Cal Ripken, Jr., retired in 2001.

Giants owner Peter Magowan told me in March 2004 that having a marquee player like Bonds was one of the strategies the club had for making sure it sold out, or nearly sold out, every night, even in those years when the team didn't make the playoffs. At that time, he didn't want to even entertain the question where the team would turn for that star power once Bonds' career was over.

"When people talk about replacing Barry's impact, he can't be replaced," he told me then.

If the new stadium was a factor in drawing fans to Giants home games, it's pretty clear that Bonds was the key to making the team a major draw on the road.

The Giants were No. 3 last year in terms of road attendance, behind only the Yankees and the Cubs. Some teams, such as the Mets and the Rockies, charge more for most of the Giants games in their park than they do for visits by other teams.

That jump in road attendance really took place in 2001, the year that Bonds hit his record 73 home runs, and previous record holder Mark McGwire played his last game.

The Giants' road attendance slipped slightly in 2002 and 2003. But last year, even as steroid rumors swirled around Bonds, the team drew more road fans than it did in his record-setting year.

"If players are playing well, the fans want to see seem them; they don't care about steroids or other controversies," said Jeff Fluhr, CEO of StubHub, the online ticket resale service.

Fluhr said the Giants were the fourth most popular team for folks who bought tickets from the company's listings, normally at a premium, behind only the Yankees, Cubs and Red Sox.

He said the demand for Giants tickets had stayed strong this spring until Bonds' announcement that he might miss the season.

"We certainly have seen a dropoff in sales of Giants tickets the last couple of days," he said. "People are waiting to see what's going to happen with him."

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