Closing Shot: The Silence Was Deafening

The Orioles topped the White Sox 8-2 at Camden Yards as fans were kept away. Baltimore manager Buck Showalter said he could hear what the broadcast crew was saying in the pressbox.getty images

If you’re looking for a template of what an MLB game is like with no fans, rewind the baseball calendar five years this week. On April 29, 2015, the Baltimore Orioles defeated the Chicago White Sox in a spectator-less game at Camden Yards played amid tensions between city residents and police.

MLB decided to play the game behind closed doors, believed to be the first crowdless game in the sport’s history, because of looting and rioting around the ballpark. A citywide curfew was imposed hours after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who suffered a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody. From the press box ambience, to player and manager comments afterward, game day took on an appropriately somber tone. 

While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic creates a different backdrop as sports eyes a return, that game offers a snapshot of what baseball may look like when and if MLB starts its 2020 season in Arizona, Florida or elsewhere. As Tim Kurkjian, who covered the game for ESPN, put it, “It was fascinating, unique, strange — all that rolled up into one.”

“What if we have no fans — are all the games going to be like the one I went to?” Kurkjian said. “If so, this is going to be the weirdest baseball season, by far, in the history of the game.”

For starters, the silence at Camden Yards, which has a capacity of almost 46,000, was deafening. When the Orioles’ Chris Davis belted a home run in the first inning, he ran around the bases in his home ballpark in total silence. And whatever sounds were made carried almost as far as Davis’ home run that landed on Eutaw Street.

Orioles manager Buck Showalter said afterward that he made sure to be careful when talking to players in the dugout or in the on-deck circle. Even from the dugout, Showalter could hear everything MASN play-by-play man Gary Thorne and color analyst Jim Palmer were saying while calling the game from the press box. Catcher Caleb Joseph told Kurkjian that he could hear everything announced inside the press box for media members. 

With no walk-up music and no on-field fan entertainment between innings, the game zoomed by in a brisk 2 hours, 3 minutes. The Orioles’ organist still played “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch. The game was still televised. The statistics and outcome still counted. But as Kurkjian said, it had the feel and sound of an intrasquad game on a back field at spring training. 

If MLB does eventually have a 2020 season, it’s increasingly likely that games would be held in venues with no fans, at least at the start. And like the 2015 game, those games will feel vastly different.

“Having been at that game, I was completely compelled by the whole thing because just how different it was,” Kurkjian said. “But if that is going to be every game, then it’s going to cease to be interesting or fascinating, and certainly is not going to be unique.”