Baseball in an (Almost) Empty Stadium

If Major League Baseball starts a 2020 season, undoubtedly there will be no fans in the stands. No vendors, no ushers, very few security people and downsized team staffs. The White Sox played the Orioles in an empty Camden Yards (a few scouts were allowed in) on April 29, 2015, because of disturbances in Baltimore after the controversial death of Freddie Gray a few days earlier. The White Sox have played before some very small crowds throughout the years – official attendance numbers are useless as they don’t count the actual fans in the stands – and I attended one of them.

Comiskey Park, Sept. 30, 1990

The White Sox were playing a one-game series versus the New York Yankees on Wednesday, April 19, 1967. The day before, the Sox had defeated the eventual American League champion Boston Red Sox, also in a one-series game, 5-2, before an announced crowd of 1,313. My father was having varicose-vein surgery that Wednesday in what is now Northwestern Memorial Hospital. My mother would travel into the city to be with him. As a senior in my last semester in high school, I figured this would be a great day to ditch school and catch a ballgame. I enlisted my friend Andy Wald to go with me.

Comiskey Park main entrance, Sept. 30, 1990

After my mother departed, I picked up Andy in our 1960 Chevrolet Impala convertible and headed to the South Side. The day was sunny but cold, probably about 40 degrees. Traffic was light on the Edens, Kennedy and Dan Ryan, and we arrived at Comiskey Park well in advance of game time. Figuring for a small crowd, we bought general-admission tickets and settled down in seats behind the far end of the Sox dugout on the 3^rd-base side.

Those attending the 2015 game in Baltimore remarked about the ability to hear various sounds not audible during normal conditions. So it was with an almost empty house. We heard the umpires – most likely 3^rd-base umpire Frank Umont – singing along with the National Anthem and the infield chatter. Some guys a few seats over were yelling at Sox 3^rd baseman Don Buford, probably with racist crap, and Buford in turn traded insults.

Frank Umont, 1955 Bowman card

Along about the 3^rd inning, the sun went behind the grandstand, and the temperature sunk into the 30s. We weren’t dressed for the occasion, so we headed out to the right-field lower deck, where the sun still shone brightly and most of the fans had migrated. From that day until the ballpark closed in 1990, I usually sat in right field – especially in the first row of the upper deck behind the auxiliary scoreboard – on both warm and cool days.

The pitchers were two of the game’s great: Whitey Ford for the Yankees and Tommy John for the White Sox. The Yankees defeated the Sox, 3-0, in what was Ford’s second-to-last MLB victory. Whitey pitched a complete game, yielding 7 hits, 2 strikeouts and 2 walks. John lasted 5 innings, giving up all 3 runs, 2 of which were unearned on an error by normally adept 1^st-baseman Tommy McCraw. Chicago native Jim O’Toole and Wilbur Wood each hurled 2 innings of shutout, 1-hit baseball. Mickey Mantle, now a 1^st baseman, went 0-5 on 3 groundouts and 2 flyouts, lowering his batting average to .100. He retired after the next season, in which I saw him play in my first game in Yankee Stadium.

Whitey Ford and Tommy John

The White Sox would contend in a four-team pennant race with the Red Sox, Tigers and Twins until the final week of the season. A doubleheader loss to the 10^th-place Kansas City A’s, who had won 2 of their last 13 games, on September 27 was the near-death blow; a 1-0 loss to the Washington Senators (the run was scored in the 1^st inning) two days later was the coup de grace.

Down to the Wire, an excellent book on the 1967 AL pennant race

The announced attendance was 3,040, but I’ve always guessed 350 was about it. There were so few that for a time I feared my father would see me on television from his hospital bed.  Ironically, I found one of those 350-some fans after he posted one of my Comiskey Park photos on his blog. It is the subject of my first blog post. It turns out that, like me, he was at the final White Sox game in Yankee Stadium on September 18, 2008. I wrote him I was willing to bet my life that he and I were the only people left who attended both 1967 and 2008 games. https://brulelaker.blogspot.com/2010/10/where-baseball-photography-and-blogging.html

Comiskey Park, Sept. 30, 1990

The game ended in a snappy 2 hours and 17 minutes, plenty of time to get Andy, the captain of the New Trier East track team, back to the suburbs in time for a triangular meet vs. Evanston and Highland Park. I drove directly to Highland Park; no track meet could be found. Figuring it was at New Trier, we headed south to Winnetka, only to find no meet there. I offered to drive Andy to Evanston – we probably would have made it on time – but he declined. The next day in one of classes, a fellow seemingly with no inkling walked up to me and said, “How do you like that? Andy Wald, the captain of the track team, missed a meet to go to a Sox game.” I replied, “Yes, I know. I drove him.” There was no reply.

It’s anybody’s guess whether there will be a baseball season in 2020. One source says it will cost owners far less to cancel the season than to play a partial schedule and thus are making all sorts of ridiculous proposals, figuring the players union will reject them and be scapegoated for no baseball this season. If there is a season, I have one suggestion: no canned crowd noise. Back in the 50s, when the Sox were idle, WCFL would carry an out-of-town game with an announcer reading the play-by-play from a ticker-tape feed with a steady crowd soundtrack. I’m not that nostalgic.