Summary: Due to the Baltimore protests/riots, the Orioles and the Chicago White Sox play a baseball game completely closed to the public for safety reasons.
On any given day during the baseball season, give the guys over at Elias Sports Bureau enough time, and they’ll relay some tidbit of information that is a FIRST EVER OCCURRENCE in Major League Baseball. Usually it will be the most obscure and discreet factoid on the planet like “First time left-hand batter collects extra-base hit off of African-American ambidextrous pitcher on a Tuesday with a humidity index of under 38% – IN HISTORY” but the point remains that every day is a first for something in the great American game.
In other words, a whole bunch of things nobody cares about, and lesser chance that anyone would actually remember.
The closing to the public of an entire baseball game though, that’s something massive, amazing and given the circumstances, completely sad and unfortunate. It is however, something that has never been done before, and for better or worse, it is certainly history in the making.
There’s a blurb in the above link about an occurrence that I remember reading about, where a minor league team wanted to have an “official” zero attendance game, so they played a game until the end of the fifth game, thus making the game official, before opening the gates to the public and letting them watch the rest for free.
Camden Yards, my declared favorite ballpark in the majors (despite my general disdain for the city of Baltimore, even prior to current events), will not even be doing that much. The gates remain closed until all 27 outs, or however many more it takes to declare a winner, are recorded. The seats will not be completely vacant, as the likelihood of team personnel, scouts and other official individuals will definitely be occupying some seats, but it’s almost a safe bet that there will be less than 100 people sitting inside of the stands that house nearly 45,000.
This, has never happened before, and this, is a genuine first-time instance that will be remembered.
I can’t imagine what that must be like. I always relish the idea of seeing games that could be perceived as unique, like the rare neutral field games, or game 163s. If I still lived up in the area, this would definitely be something I’d consider trying to go see, but that would be impossible since it’s closed to the public outright.
As players, many of whom really love the adrenaline of playing in front of a crowd, will be playing in front of basically nobody, where the cracks of the bats will echo ominously, and the yells and calls from teammates and umpires will be heard with an eerie clarity. It’s not so much a game as much as it’s going to be an obligated duty that needs to be done, in order to avoid a massive complication later on in the baseball calendar.
Eventually one team will have more runs than the other team, and for lack of a better term, they’ll be the “winners” of the game. But when it boils down to the circumstances in which the game was played, and how it happened, pretty much everyone will still have lost. Just because it’s historic, doesn’t necessarily have to mean it was positive.
