Baseball needs to eliminate fake crowd noise and cardboard cutouts in seats

I’m glad Major League Baseball is back underway. But I can’t get past the weirdness of watching games with empty stands and I’m not sure what can be done to make it any better.

Major League Baseball has a buzz to it. Especially by the time you get to July and August and the pennant races are really starting to heat up. You can tell most of what’s going on without even glancing at the television or even the field if you’re at the ballpark in person. The cheers, the boos, the gasps and the grumbles are all part of the experience. I’ve been in Busch Stadium before when it’s been empty and it’s just not the same place as it is when the St. Louis Cardinals are playing.

Not anymore. I can’t figure out what they’re trying to do with the fake fan noise even when I am watching games intently. I assume that the people pressing the noise button are watching the same game, aren’t they?

It seems like everything teams have done to drown out the quiet has backfired. First, the piped in crowd noise is considerably worse than no noise at all. At best, it’s inappropriate. Watching the Los Angeles Dodgers host the San Francisco Giants I watched a home team player rip a double into the gap to polite — yet unenthusiastic — fake applause. A few minutes later, a visiting pitcher struck out a home team batter to the same tepid but positive response. I couldn’t imagine the Cardinals giving up a home run to the Chicago Cubs and someone hitting a button to simulate a crowd cheering.

Maybe it’s the old journalist in me. But the real problem I have with the fake cheering is the dishonesty of it all. I don’t like when digital magic is used to manipulate the sites, sounds or words of history. Someday these videos are going to be in the archives of the Hall of Fame and I’d rather they were accurate to the history of the times. When you start to lower the bar for fictionalizing coverage of events, where do you stop?

Fox Sports is reportedly taking things a lot farther with plans to populate the stands with digitized fans. Not only is that extremely dishonest. It’s also offensive in the fact that the fake fans will actually do “the wave.”

Another dud of an idea was the plan to put cardboard cutouts of fans in the seats in areas the cameras picks up. Yeah, that looks really natural. Now I can’t stop scanning the faux audience, looking at the ridiculously happy faces that never move. Nothing creepy at all about that.

If they want to solve the noise problem with something that’s authentic, how about bringing back the days when organists were more prevalent in baseball? In the minors — and formerly in the big leagues — the organist would play between foul balls and while waiting for the next batter to approach the plate. It would certainly help to fill in some of the dead air and it would actually feel like baseball. Forget about the fake reactions in the ballpark. Maybe teams could put camera in a room with a local family for each game and they could react to the games in real time. Talk is that the Cardinals will sell tickets to the stands on top of ballpark village to keep them technically outside of the ballpark. Put a camera on them for some reaction.

I know, I know. This is what we can have under the current circumstances and it’s better than nothing. I just haven’t been able to get my head around the new normal yet.

Scott Wuerz

Belleville News-Democrat

Scott Wuerz has written “Cheap Seats,” a St. Louis Cardinals fan blog for the Belleville News-Democrat, since 2007. He is a former BND reporter who covered breaking news and education.