Orioles 8, White Sox 2 Attendance: 0
Baltimore makes best of one of oddest games in baseball history
• Chris Davis might have hit the quietest home run for the home team in Orioles history.
As the slugger pounded the ball deep onto Eutaw Street, just a few feet from where fans normally would have sprinted after a chance to catch a souvenir, there was almost nothing to hear.
The only muffled cheers came from a pocket of diehards locked out of Camden Yards yelling “Let’s Go O’s!”
On this day, 30,000 Orioles fans had been muted. The wild applause had been silenced. There were no fans to stand for a standing ovation.
Just Davis’ teammates in the dugout coming over for high-fives.
“When you’re rounding the bases, and the only cheers you hear were from outside the stadium,” he said, “it’s a weird feeling.”
Baseball in Baltimore was closed to the public Wednesday. The shutout in the final score was in the attendance total: Orioles 8, White Sox 2, Fans 0.
MLB decided to play the game behind closed doors because of looting and rioting around Camden Yards that broke out amid tensions between residents and police. The turmoil prompted a citywide curfew and began hours after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody.
The game was one of the oddest in history, brought alive only by sounds that were unmasked by the absence of fans’ voices.
No cheering for the Orioles, no jeering the umpires. Not an usher, a wave, or one last call for a cold beer.
The sounds of the game popped for the lucky hundreds of players, media or staff allowed inside, with each “whack!” “crack!” and “pop!” echoing throughout empty Camden Yards. Behind the plate, a couple of scouts kept their eyes on the action.
The players were as audible as kids playing backyard wiffle ball.
When Chicago second baseman Micah Johnson got the relay throw from right fielder Avisail Garcia, those around him shouted “No!” as he turned to make a throw to the plate.
That’s because Everth Cabrera had stopped at third base.
The unrest from the past week wasn’t forgotten. Outside Camden Yards, Brendan Hurson carried a sign that read, “Don’t Forget Freddie Gray,” with the O’s in the shape of the Orioles’ logo.
He wished the Orioles let fans into the park.
“It would have been a nice chance to show the world that we are a city that’s going to move forward from this. Not move on, but move forward. And they blew it.”