Blue Jays: Please, enough with the canned crowd noise

MLB plans to use fake crowd noise for the 2020 season without fans, and from the clips we’ve seen from the Blue jays’ social media, I wish it would stop.

It’s going to be a strange season of Major League Baseball no matter how you look at it. The season has been shortened to 60 games, the divisions have been re-aligned, and we now know the Blue Jays won’t even be playing their home games in Canada. It’ll still be baseball, but it’s going to look a lot different.

But does it have to sound that different?

I guess that’s the question the league is asking themselves right now, and earlier in the week the Associated Press reported that the league plans to use canned crowd noise to simulate the feel of a real stadium filled with fans. However, if the examples that we’re seeing (or hearing) on social media are any indication, I would rather listen to the natural sounds of an empty ballpark.

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Maybe it sounds better when you’re physically at the stadium, or maybe the players find it helpful, but as for yours truly, I think it sounds ridiculous and I hope they stop the experiment before it starts.

To be fair, it’s not without precedent for professional leagues to pipe in simulated crowd noise. It’s been used in professional soccer leagues this year, and the KBO has done the same as they’ve played over the last few months. After browsing through Twitter to look for fan reactions, it seems like there are plenty who appreciate it, and others who feel the way that i do.

At least they’re going to try and keep things are realistic as possible, as it sounds like they have as many as 75 different crowd reactions at the league’s disposal according to the AP article. Those sounds have been lifted from the video game “MLB the Show”, which makes sense, and I would imagine that whomever is in charge of said reactions will have quite the job ahead of them, and that it would likely come with a pretty decent learning curve.

If it were up to me though, I’d ditch the whole thing and embrace the weirdness of the 2020 campaign. The visual is going to tell us that there are no fans in the stands (I’ll miss you this year ‘Home Plate Lady’), and because of that, it just seems like a goofy thing to add.

Maybe that’s just me though. How do you feel about the idea of fake crowd noise?