"Finally. Baseball."
Going based on the smile on Derek Shelton's face, you probably wouldn't have been able to tell that the Pirates had just lost his managerial debut at PNC Park to the Indians, 5-3, Saturday night. It was just an exhibition, and even one where he could feel optimistic about the work his starting pitcher, Joe Musgrove, had turned in.
But after a wait like the Pirates and Major League Baseball had gone through to just get to this point, the first words Shelton offered as he got in front of the camera postgame felt like he right sentiment:
"Finally. Baseball."
"I’ve been waiting a little while, as you guys know, to sit and look at that skyline and watch a game with another team," Shelton said during a postgame Zoom conference Saturday.
It was 128 days, to be exact, between the Pirates' last spring training game March 12 and their first exhibition game against an actual opponent during summer camp Saturday. This contest was one of the first three true exhibitions in baseball, with the Yankees-Mets and Phillies-Nationals also playing Saturday. They are the first competitive games by any of the four major North American sports since mid-March.
It isn't quite the same game they played back before the pandemic in March, with new health and safety protocols put in place to protect players and coaches.
The changes started before the game. Instead of a high-five, Jason Martin tapped elbows with a Cleveland player to celebrate ending a round of batting practice by putting a ball into the seats in right. The national anthem was prerecorded at the stadium earlier in the week and played on the scoreboard. Once it was done, some players and team personnel started to file into the seats behind home plate. There are now green tents set up by each team's dugout and by the bullpens, allowing both teams to socially distance better.
None of those changes felt drastic, but the real concern was what a game would be like without fans in the stands.
The Pirates had experimented with adding crowd noise to their intrasquad games this week, though it had been static, white noise up until Saturday's game.
"I realized yesterday, listening to it for the first time, that you can't really tell if it's a home crowd or not," Ben Cherington said with a laugh Wednesday. "I'm not sure who they're rooting for."
That blandness was not a point in the artificial noise's favor. Musgrove went on the record earlier this week saying he would prefer to pitch in silence, but most of his teammates wanted something.
"You're not really invisible anymore as a catcher, so I'm trying to get set later [with] targets a lot more often than I otherwise would," Luke Maile said earlier this week.
"I think we should get a little white noise in there, just to confuse microphones or whatnot," Kyle Crick said Saturday afternoon.
"I don't really want to hear the other team's conversations from their dugout, and I don't want them hearing ours," Jacob Stallings said in the opening week of camp.
Shelton was also a proponent of crowd noise, so the Pirates were going to at least try it in a game scenario. As Musgrove finished warming up to 'Even Flow' by Pearl Jam, it was time to see what the Pirates had planned.
Then the crowd started to come over the speakers.
Finally. Baseball.
Fake cheers -- including spikes of artificial excitement when the Pirates do something right, like get a hit or record an out -- was constant. Players were given walk-up music and a fair dose of applause as they walked to the plate, with recordings of public address announcer Tim DeBacco's introductions echoing through the stadium. Recordings of the late Vince Lascheid's organ work rang through the stadium following a strikeout by Musgrove.
If it wasn't for the pregnant pauses after the Lascheid audio's cues for a 'Charge!' or 'Let's Go Bucs!' chant, and the silent rendition of 'Take Me out to the Ball Game,' it did sound like a normal day at the ballpark.
"I thought we did a really good job with the fan noise," Shelton said. "Made it seem pretty realistic."
How about you, Musgrove?
"It still felt like a game," he said. "When you're on the mound, man, you've got tunnel vision. You can hardly even see your dugouts. You've really got what's right behind the plate and the umpire. So that visual, for me, was pretty much the same. You don't have the loud noise, and it's not true, authentic fan noise that you hear. It's run through speakers, so that's a little bit strange. As far as my ability to focus on the task on hand, I was about the same."
About the same might be the best any team can hope for this season.
And maybe a few less "woos."
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