BOSTON. It was a scene that would have been hard to imagine not too long ago; perennially sold-out Fenway Park with baseball players on the field, but no fans in the stands.
“It’s the right thing to do,” said groundskeeper Mel Carnaki of Medford, Mass. “Until they discover a vaccine for the COVID virus that’s more effective than a placebo, I’m social distancing from people besides my mother-in-law.”
In order to lend an air of verisimilitude to radio and TV broadcasts, the Sox decided to generate artificial crowd noise to go along with cardboard cutouts of fans scattered through the stadium. “We want everybody watching at home or listening in their cars to get the feel of a regular game,” said Emily Norgran-Phillips, Director of Fan Experience. “We have a smorgasbord of familiar sounds to make people think nothing’s changed except we lost our best player, Mookie Betts, so we’ll probably suck for a few years.”
The 75 plus “samples” of traditional Fenway Park noise include a constant crowd “murmur” when the ball isn’t in play and “oohs” and “ahs” for home runs, as well as complaints about the smell of the ballpark’s traditionally odoriferous restrooms. “Geez,” a women’s voice with a working class Boston accent is heard to say as starting pitcher Nate Eovaldi took the mound. “It smells like my first husband’s armpits in there.”
No trip to Fenway pre-coronavirus was considered complete without an unwelcome spray of beer from a clumsy fan returning to his seat, and the for-now anonymous Red Sox employee working an iPad to bring the sounds of the past to the empty stadium of the present is on the case.
“Hey, you spilled beer on my kid!” an outraged father’s voice exclaims.
“Did I tell your wife to dress him in a $90 shirt with a freaking polo player on it?” a gruffer voice replies. “I don’t think so.”
The Sox were the last major league team to field an African-American player, Pumpsie Green in 1959, and given the team’s fraught history in this area the decision by the front office to paint a large “Black Lives Matter” on the outside of the stadium was met with derision by one artificial fan. “Who are you kidding?” a wiseacre voice complains. “You think I’m gonna take a lecture on race from a team that turned down Jackie Robinson?”
Some of the female cardboard cutouts are quite hot.
I should have gone to that game … I can be artificial.