Fake me out to the ball game noise

For months now, my family has listened to my grumbling about the canned crowd noise that’s been larded onto telecasts of many pro sports games — the bogus thrum of mass chatter in largely empty stadiums serving as the athletic equivalent of a laugh track.

I would get especially annoyed during baseball games that, as you could see any time a wide shot followed a home run into the bleachers, were being played to virtually zero spectators.

“Wow, the crowd’s really going wild,” I would say dryly.

Coming to a rolling boil after a few innings, I would recommend ways to improve the effect by embracing the unreality of the situation. The networks could paste on, say, the bleating of sheep or barking dogs in place of ostensibly human noises (“Goldschmidt swings … it’s a rope into left field as Edman rounds third … BAAAHH ROWF ROWF ROWF BAAAAHHHH!”) or famous lines from movies digitally multiplied into a maniacal gabble (“Anderson glances to first … here’s the windup … lights out to end the inning! … I’M AS MAD AS HELL AND I’M

NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE! YOU TALKIN’ TO ME? ATTICA!”).

This would be much better, I said, steepling my fingers like a supervillain.

Leave it alone, my loved ones responded. Just be glad we’ve got any sports to watch amid the pandemic. Have another beer. We’ll be going to bed soon and you can watch your cinema.

For a long time, I was unable to articulate what bugged me so much about fake crowd noise, which according to ESPN’S reporting was drawn from a deck of around 75 audio clips taken from the video game MLB: The Show.

There was, of course, my reflexive journalist’s horror at the hyping of what’s supposed to be reality. A baseball game isn’t a sitcom, and juicing it with Potemkin audience reaction was just wrong — the TV equivalent of a Sharpie on a hurricane map.

But there was also my deep affection for the natural quiet of a baseball game that’s being played without a big crowd. George Carlin’s famous comparison of football to baseball notes the latter’s endurance as “a 19th-century pastoral game” that’s full of open spaces where silence or something like it can endure. I’ve watched enough low-attendance Little League contests and even a few college games in March on the frozen tundra of northern Ohio to appreciate

the hush that settles on the field in between blazing plays. Can’t we just enjoy the game itself ?

Fox Sports actually took things even further into the Uncanny Valley by populating the empty stands with digitally created fake fans. In a tweet touting “our latest broadcasting innovation,” the network showed off how it could manipulate these humanoids by, say, changing all of their jerseys with the push of a few buttons.

“Yes ... they’ll even be doing the wave,” the network said in a promo — as if the wave couldn’t get any worse.

Here, as well, the possibilities for embracing the surreal were endless, and the failure to at least try a few innovations reveals how much network sports programmers are missing out by not recruiting from the ranks of our nation’s hard-working conceptual artists. Fox Sports could have vastly improved your average Tuesday-night game between, say, the Reds and the Cardinals by filling the stands with the creatures from Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” or Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples wearing T-shirts assailing the Astros as cheaters, or a stadium full of Peter Sellers as uncolorized Dr. Strangelove, giggling Teutonically at every foul ball. Yes ... they’ll even be doing the wave.

As previously noted in this space, my son is a pitcher. Last summer, I attended several of his games in the sylvan setting of Shuttleworth Park in Amsterdam. The fans stayed far apart and tended to be masked; the mozzarella sticks and beer were brought to you by the waitstaff; and the crowd was small but enthusiastic. I never felt the need to be comforted by the sight of, say, mannequins in cargo shorts filling up the stands. It was weird, and that was all right.

Actual flesh-and-blood fans were back in the stands beginning Monday, when the ALCS series between the Braves and the Dodgers kicked off at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. More than 11,000 tickets were sold. The same day, the Lone Star State reported more than 4,000 new coronavirus positives and 26 deaths from COVID-19. Around the nation, 46,000 new cases were recorded Monday, part of what appears to be the climb to a third peak in infections.

Future generations might have a clearer view of whether the coronavirus or the failure to apprehend reality turns out to be the greatest challenge America faces in 2020. What’s for sure is that they’re linked — what the more philosophical class of epidemiologists might call comorbidities of the body politic.

There are worse things than fake crowd sounds, but don’t try to tell me that it isn’t a symptom.