This should have been a Bill Veeck stunt, the idea of an owner with the imagination of a stoned college freshman. What if they played a baseball game in front of no one, man? It should have been a stunt, a lark, something to break up the tedium of the 162-game season.
It was not. Orioles announcer Gary Thorne quickly brought some gravity.
This is one of those moments where you may make history, but you wish you didn’t have to do it.
Thorne also included the exact phrase, “wished this were under different circumstances” in his intro. There’s nothing quite like a good ol’-fashioned baseball curiosity, and the century-old history and sheer quantity of games have given us an exponential number of squirrels on the field, baseballs caught in beer cups, and fans running on the field. But baseball curiosities don’t mix well with tragedy.
Jim Palmer started his introduction by noting that in 1968, Baltimore went through “what, six … seven … eight days of, uh, race riots and whatever” in a casual way, toeing the line between awkward and dismissive. They cut to a pitcher warming up in front of empty stands.
That sort of shot should have been amazing, funny, absurd. It almost was until you remembered it happened because a young man’s spine was severed.
Slowly, though, the levity started to trickle in. It was impossible to keep it out. Caleb Joseph started it off, playing up the surreality by signing autographs for phantom children that only he could see.
#Orioles Caleb Joseph signing fake autographs and taking fake applause as heads on the field https://t.co/twJIXikgam
— Jake Ciely (@allinkid) April 29, 2015
So very many jokes started flying around Twitter, as jokes are wont to do, and for stretches it was easy to forget just why the stands were empty, which made everything that much worse when the stretches were over. There was no right way to enjoy it other than not enjoying it, except it was easy to lose yourself and forget exactly why there was a baseball game.
Or a golf tournament. And we all learned a little bit from it. Five lessons from an oddity that was too ghoulish to enjoy fully:
Lesson #1: Yes, it is weird to not hear the fans
That’s the thesis. It’s an unsurprising thesis. This could have been pre-written yesterday. But when Chris Davis walloped a three-run homer into warehouse territory, it was almost peaceful.
That’s the dream of every boy, perhaps, at one point or another, hitting a baseball that far. And here’s someone who does it enough to take it for granted, doing it in front of a handful of peers and three scouts in the front row. The looping of the Vine does this highlight wonders. Put it on in the background as you sleep.
Foul balls clanked off seats and sat untouched where piles of peanut shells should have been. Helicopters flew over and sounded like they were a part of a Mad Max: Fury Road viral marketing stunt, like the apocalypse was about to land on Manny Machado’s face. And then they would pass and the baseball would be really, really quiet.
Yes, it was weird. Yup. Sure was weird.
Lesson #2: You can’t keep fans away
After every positive Orioles development — and there were sure a lot of them in the first inning — there was still clapping. If you’ve ever watched a stray college game at a small school or gone to a Class-A game, it sounded not unlike that. Sporadic, distant clapping is still clapping, and the sounds were like weeds growing out of a crack in the asphalt of a six-acre parking lot. They shouldn’t exist, but those things always find a way.
Keep people within a six-mile radius away, and someone will figure out a way to shoot a bottle rocket over the stadium after a home run.
Lesson #3: The problem with the pace of baseball is you
There were 10 runs scored in the game and 242 total pitches thrown. Time of game: 2:03. To be fair, most of the scoring was concentrated in the first inning, but there was still a disconnect between the results of the game and the pace at which it was played.
Commissioner Rob Manfred’s new direction is clear, then. Make the game more appealing to fans by not allowing fans to attend. It’s just so crazy, it might work.
Lesson #4: The typical baseball broadcast is absolutely filled with superfluous noise and chatter
This was an experiment about what would happen if everyone strained to hear the ambient noise behind a baseball game. The findings were this: Boy, baseball games sure are filled with loud noises, even when there’s no crowd to help out.
I’m not talking about the crack of the bat or the infielders calling each other off on a popup, either. I’m talking about the announcers, especially Thorne and Palmer, who are absolute wizards at talking without interruption for hour after hour. I’m talking about the horrible chugga-chugga of early-’00s nü-metal that’s been homogenized and repackaged as bumper music for a sponsor (Ford? Kia? Marie Callender’s? No idea), which bled into the outro music between innings.
Listen to the sounds of a baseball broadcast without a crowd, and you’ll hear what I mean.
It’s Garfield Without Garfield. Funny and bleak at the same time. And funky. Definitely funky. Distractingly funky, especially when paired with mostly silence.
Lesson #5: Baseball doesn’t work as an escape if the escape is foisted on you
This was a game that was played for pragmatic reasons. It wasn’t an insensitive decision, it was a decision made to avoid a mess in the future. The White Sox and Orioles are already having to give up a mutual off-day to play a doubleheader, and getting another makeup game on the schedule would have required the White Sox flying from Minnesota to Baltimore to Chicago within a 28-hour span, which would have left a lot to be desired. The sport wouldn’t have crumbled without this game, but it was played in front of empty seats because it was practical to do so.
It wasn’t an escape, though. That’s what baseball is best at. That’s what sports do. They’re an escape from the file that’s supposed to be on Mr. Pembly’s desk by noon, the darkness encroaching on your home life, and/or an unthinkable shared tragedy. That’s why this is remembered as a great highlight:
There will never be apples-to-apples for that, this, or any other tragedy, but you can tell how the emotion of the crowd is existing both in and outside the context of a baseball game. Sports can work like that. It’s one of the reasons we care so damned much about them. This was sports gently tip-toeing around the perimeter of healing, though, knowing that it can’t help right now and doing its best not to bother anyone. It was too much cognitive dissonance to handle.
Wednesday’s game was the perversion of a personal dream, in which we all had the option to occasionally flip over and catch a broadcast with nothing but the sounds of the field and the park. Instead, here was baseball with nothing but announcers and the low hum of an air conditioner, placed in a context in which it was impossible to forget that life is nasty, brutish, and short.
Baseball without a crowd? Yes, it’s weird. We’ve confirmed it. Let it never happen again.
