A couple of nights ago I went to a Seattle Mariners baseball game. It was interesting as there was virtually no one there. In the state that I live in they can have vaccinated sections as well as pod seating. I sat in the vaccinated section, which was pretty empty…the whole ballpark was pretty empty.
What was really interesting was the things that they played to get the crowd pumped up. All the little graphics with sound effects fell flat on the crowd. Whoever plays the sounds was playing them like it was a bigger crowd. I don’t know if they have incentive to mess around with other techniques, especially when our state opens up in less than two weeks.
Performers know that you really need to work a small, spread out crowd differently than a packed house.
Here’s what worked: The interactive things on the jumbotron, we have a hydroplane race where the crowd cheers for a color, and they do a shellgame with baseball hats and a baseball.
Seeing that I would have tried doing some facts or trivia about the batter, then rolling the reaction into a sound/graphic that pumped up the crowd. I don’t know if it would have worked, but it would probably have done at least as well as what they were doing.