Fans missing from baseball, and so is the fun
It wasn’t a prayer, but I did ask, “Would somebody make it stop? Please, make it stop?” Then, it ended.
With just two outs in the bottom of the ninth in the AstrosRoyals “baseball” game Tuesday afternoon, the second and final tune-up for Houston’s 2020 season, the teams walked off the field and called it a day.
I have sat in a nearly empty Astrodome with an entire section to myself to see a last-place team in the dog days of August. I’ve been to meaningless springtraining games in alligator towns in Florida where everyone in the crowd was related. And I have been to semi-pro baseball games in which the entire audience ate from the same plate of nachos.
Tuesday afternoon’s game had the least amount of energy of any baseball game I have ever seen.
We have been saying for months that we couldn’t wait for the baseball season to start. We didn’t think it would matter if there were people in the stands. We were wrong. Perhaps the scene will be different when the real games begin, but if Monday’s and Tuesday’s games in Kansas City are samples of what is to come, this will be a horribly boring baseball season.
Houston won Tuesday’s practice game 15-6 behind an offense expected to be among the sport’s best this season. But it wasn’t fun to watch.
To add injury to insufferable, Astros star second baseman Jose Altuve left the game early with a leg contusion. The injury doesn’t appear serious, but with the 60-game regular-season sprint scheduled to start Friday, any missed time could be crucial.
Winning and losing and the pennant race might become secondary to the pitiful product that baseball will be during the coronavirus pandemic. The games I tried to watch over the weekend were unbearable.
Instead of giving us what we’ve been missing, the fanless games remind me of what we don’t have.
They’re Steak-umm to a meat lover who hasn’t had a prime ribeye in several months. An endless loop of “Dumb and Dumber” for someone who hasn’t been to a movie theater since winter.
To be fair, the exhibition element added to, or subtracted from as it were, the meaninglessness of the contest. When the games are real, the change in intensity might improve the product and certainly will change the pace.
When the Orioles and White Sox played a regularseason game without fans in 2015, it lasted just two hours and three minutes.
Tuesday’s monstrosity ran almost four hours. A good nap ruined. (Full disclosure: The eighth inning didn’t exactly take away from said nap.)
I now doubt whether fan-free baseball will be a positive addition to your day. It is available only on TV, and this is bad television.
The announcers’ call sounds like a demo tape. The piped in crowd noise is worse than a laugh track. And the in-stadium music seems very much out of place.
Do we really need organ beats designed for audience participation?
Da-da-da DA da-da … wait for it … wait … sorry, charge is not coming.
You probably didn’t know that composer Tommy Walker wrote that little ditty while he was a student at USC in 1946. I came across that information in the middle innings.
The Astros hit four home runs and celebrated them with air-fives while I researched the origin of the “Charge” song, read up on “Jack and Diane,” found out that originally Jack was a Black guy who did not want to be a football star, and realized that none of the current Astros players were alive when their manager Dusty Baker invented the high-five.
Did I lose you?
Well, I had to look up how to write out the lyrics to the song. Anytime one refers to a song as a ditty, John Cougar comes to mind. Meanwhile, the Astros did their faux fives in the background, which reminded me of Baker’s fascinating place in celebration history.
If the games don’t improve, I’ll spend a lot of time surfing the web for trivia, and the shortest baseball season in history will be very long.
One would think that without fans in attendance at least the unnecessary playing of the national anthem would be eradicated from these games, but nah. No such luck.
Had Roseanne Barr been on hand to butcher Francis Scott Key’s lyrics, it would have been an improvement.
Seriously. An under-theweather Carl Lewis on the anthem — “Uh oh!” — would have lifted the excitement level tremendously.
Baseball is a wondrous pursuit, fascinating in its simplicity, mystifying in its complexity.
Fans are extremely important to the baseball experience. Without them, baseball is a different game, and I’m afraid it might not be much fun.
I do hope that isn’t the case with basketball, as the NBA is about to crank up in Orlando sans fans also.
I wonder who wrote that little ditty “De-fense! (clapclap) De-fense! (clapclap)?”