The 2020 Major League Baseball season begins next week, but an important component of the games will be lost due to the pandemic: the crowds. Fortunately, the studio behind the MLB series The Show has been recording the reactions of the MLB gaming crowd for several seasons, and now those noises will fill the real-life MLB stadiums rather than a live crowd. .
MLB games aren’t just cheers and simulated boos: ESPN reports that approximately 75 reactions from the video game crowd will resonate through the stadium sound systems at the appropriate times during games. The hope is that the crowd noises will help make watching and playing MLB games as authentic as possible.
“You are still focused on the game, but that noise is very useful. I could say that the first scrimmages in pure silence were difficult for some guys,” Brewers infielder Eric Sogard said. “You could hear the other kayak talking, and it was a little awkward.”
Apparently, crowd noise will be audible when you’re watching home games on TV, which isn’t always the case in other examples of simulated crowd noise.
This is not a completely new idea, actually. For example, the crowd noises of FIFA 20 are used during actual Premier League games, with EA supplying European soccer leagues with 13 hours of sound and 1,300 individual “assets”.
While we wait for the real MLB 2020 season to begin, here are the MLB The Show 2020 Player Ratings according to the default list.
