On May 26th, the New York Mets were doing poorly (overall) and downright terrible (on the spot). They were at the bottom of their division and down six runs to zero against the Cincinnati Reds, a team whose payroll and—if I may—swag levels were dwarfed by the Mets’. The Mets player was recently booed by his fans. Things were, by any measure, not going well on the Citi front. But that night, like every other night this season, the field look, beat, and feel like a European nightclub on New Year’s Eve: flashing lights; progressive music; the in-game announcer takes to the 17,400 square foot screen and pleads with the fans make noisewhile the fans responded with joy. If you were a time traveler or even just someone who hadn’t played the game in a few years, you’d be pretty confused.
I’m 38 years old, which means I’m old enough to remember when live baseball didn’t have fake pitches. This was a time when you could hear the entire stadium go silent with a high-pitched beat, when the game’s big production staff didn’t take any extra time like a chance to play a pop song or advertise some unfathomable financial services company, when stadium screens showed scores and not a series of baseball-related TikToks. These days, baseball is wall-to-wall excitement, from pregame to postgame. A few years ago, nearly 50 percent of the empty air at Rogers Center, where the Toronto Blue Jays play, was taken up by music and other sounds; now that figure it is close to 95 percent. The Yankees are playing a sound effect from Star Wars every time the number of strikes reaches two, and they have since 2021—four years before they let their players having facial hair. Thirty years agothe walk-up single was a novelty, and was played only at the beginning of each at-bat; now many stadiums play music between each stadium.
In this way, baseball clearly follows other sports, which previously invested in high-quality multi-sound systems, large screens, and modern lighting graphics. (“It’s time for baseball to catch up with the NBA,” Aaron Boone, Yankees manager, he told recently reporter who asked about the “sudden inundation” of noise at games.) The first time the New York Knicks won the NBA Finals, in 1973, in-game audio was virtually inaudible in basketball—much to the distraction of players and fans. Now multi-million dollar speakers blast music almost every minute, and the audience wear ear protection as if they are at a concert, which is true. Meanwhile, SoFi Stadium, where the Rams and Los Angeles Chargers play, is screened by the Infinity Screen, a band-shaped video monitor that weighs more than 1,000 tons and is actually larger than a suspended football field. Many arenas now offer sensory devices (headphones, fidget spinners) just so neurodivergent fans can endure the game. Attending a sports game is twice as expensive as it was a quarter of a century ago, but at least there is no denying that money doesn’t get you anything.
Sports have always been entertainment, basically. But in the last few decades, new technology has made excitement more frequent, and the new economics of sports management have encouraged it. Most organizations don’t focus on season ticket holders but more casual fans who want a big night, are willing to pay, and may need to be guided through a game with auditory or visual cues about how to feel at any given moment. Teams have collected big data about their fans and developed sophisticated market segmentation strategies: Moms who consume food, say, can cause stadiums to add more vendors to attract them. Squares and squares are look more like theme parks. Mascots, it was an afterthought, are celebrities—Gritty, the mischievous ogre who represents the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, has more Instagram followers than any of the team’s players.
Even the food is more amazing, more disgusting, more graphic. A vendor at Citi Square sells fresh-filled eggs traditional foods from each visiting team: hotdish for the Minnesota Twins; Cuban Sandwich for the Miami Marlins; clam chowder, unfortunately, for the Boston Red Sox. The Indiana Pacers and its WNBA affiliate, the Fever, have also experimented with “unique culinary things,” Joey Graziano, the teams’ chief business officer, told me, “so you can have that Instagram picture with that amazing slice of cake that you want all your fans to see that you just got at a Fever game.” Okay!
Any team is competing for attention with other teams, sure—but really, it’s competing with concerts, restaurants, and social media, and Netflix. Everything is an opportunity cost, and we have more opportunities. Graziano told me that the coronavirus pandemic taught pitches that people want to do less — “but what they want to do, they want to do more strongly,” he said. “You could argue that it’s a completely pointless decision from your bed.”
Scale: Last year, when Russell Kovshoff started working for the Whitecaps, Vancouver’s major league soccer team, production was “very small,” he told me. By the time he rebuilt the team’s program, a year later, he had introduced flags, pyrotechnics, drag queens, a 50-person dance group, a 100-person choir. His goal, he said, was to take soccer, a centuries-old sport with strict rules about in-game noise, and find ways to “infuse it with entertainment.”
In 1971, baseball legend Roger Angell be considered that “more and more, each sport resembles all sports; the taste, the peculiar joy of place and season, the singular display of courage and strength and style which once distinguished each sport and endeared it to us has disappeared somewhere in the noise and crush.” He was lamenting the age of televised sports, which was still relatively new and which he believed had helped usher in an era of “exaggeration,” which threatened to “lose our cognitive abilities and enthusiasm and, over time, attention.”
Angell believed that baseball would survive all this, mainly because baseball was a little boring—it’s slow by nature; immunity from concert; “rustic, non-violent, and introspective”; the only one of the major team games whose events were not accelerated by any external clock.
Hockey people love baseball because it’s baseball. We love that it’s specific, and we love that it’s rewarding to pay attention. In San Francisco, you can hear the seagulls, and sitting comfortably in any stadium, you can hear the sound of a fastball hitting the skin, if you listen carefully enough and no one is playing a DJ Khaled song.
A few years ago, Louisville’s minor league baseball team, the Bats, started a new night with the theme: “No commercials, videos or on-field announcements, just baseball at its purest.”
Vincent Zielen, Bats’ marketing director, has been working in baseball for a decade, and he told me that. There is no night it was a response to something he had been discovering more and more over the past few years. “There’s definitely a push for more entertainment, more frequent engagement,” he said. No Night is a response to the style and its model—another themed night, where the theme is “baseball.” Zielen’s job is to do whatever it takes to bring in new fans, especially young ones. The game “needed to get more energetic, more youthful,” Zielen said. “And for today’s generation, the way to do that is through constant collaboration. Savannah Bananas have proven that.”
That’s it. Zielen wasn’t the only person to mention the Bananas, a barnstorming team whose motto is “We Make Baseball Fun!” and that is often described as baseball’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters. Banana dancers dance in the background, perform skits, and dance in the arena. (Not at all surprising, many are also TikTok celebrities—same skill.) Last season, Bananas. to be sold 2.2 million tickets, which would make them the 20th-most popular team in major league baseball if they were a major league baseball team, which they are not. Not that it seems to matter much: “All these kids are now expecting Savannah Bananas-type dating,” Zielen said.
And so the question that he and his team are trying to answer is: “How do we create that excitement from the beginning, when people get out of their car in the parking lot until they leave? We don’t want it to be dull at any point.”
Laziness is the essence of baseball, but it can also be the enemy of most people look baseball. From 2007 to 2022, annual attendance at games declined by nearly 20 percent. In 2023, Major League Baseball instituted a change stack designed to make the game faster, zippier, more profitable, more exciting, more extensive. More specifically, the league added, for the first time in history, the clock.
Angell, the baseball writer, had died the year before; We’ll never know what he would have done about these changes to the basic nature of the game. But many baseball people were sad about it. (The only thing baseball people like more than being a little bored is being pissed off about baseball.) They’re pissed about Bananas, too, and about noise. But baseball attendance has been on the rise. In the year 2024, I spent a lot of time complaining about how annoying it is to be at a game these days, but I also did something I didn’t think was possible: I watched my toddler sit through all nine innings, completely enthralled by everything he heard and saw.
The Bats hosted their first Nothing Night of the season on May 15. There were no flashing lights, no scoreboard animations, no commercials, no music other than instrumental music. The idea went viral. But, Zielen said, “we didn’t get the seats in the seats that we wanted”—the weather wasn’t great.
The next night was Star Wars at night Zielen’s team created special sound effects, dressed the players in themed jerseys, and produced 2,000 “space swords,” and had 30 people walking around the field dressed as various characters, taking selfies. There was a costume contest between innings, a drone show afterward, and, as Zielen put it, “the constant engagement.” The stadium was packed.
