When baseball is pitched without fans in the stands, those who watch home games will still be able to cheer, boo, or applaud their favorite teams virtually.
Major League Baseball will launch a feature on Opening Day that will allow fans to interact with their team’s games on its website, the Gameday app, and via social media links. Scoreboard operators at ball stadiums will receive a live interface that will reflect the fan reaction, allowing you to adjust the type of artificial noise from the pumped fan to the empty stadiums.
“We’re not actually providing the boo sounds, so it’s solving a problem there,” said Chris Marinak, executive vice president of strategy, technology and innovation for MLB. “We are only supplying teams with background noise, different types of cheers and anticipatory sounds, but there are no actual boos we provide. In case there is a lot of booing, it would just boil down to being very quiet.”
With interactive features for fans, those who are logged in will be able to see what percentage of those who are watching the root of certain teams while seeing the three reaction icons appear on the screen, similar to the hearts in an Instagram video Live.
“They will see if they are Red Sox-Yankees if they are 50/50, 90% Yankees fans,” said Marinak. “There is a slider bar that will show it relatively. You will also see at the bottom of that, you will see the icons floating on the screen. You will see it visually based on what is coming in the application.”
The option to log into the animation feature will appear along with the Gameday score chart and launch chart. It will also be featured on team websites and teams will share links on social media.
“It’s not the same as sitting next to your best friends in the stands, but creating a sense of community of fans and a sense of commitment and their favorite teams will help reinforce what will be a unique season,” said Marinak.
Expect online fan interactivity to evolve throughout the season. Teams will eventually be able to stream their prerecorded entertainment features between tickets, such as pet racing, hat racing or Beat the Freeze in Atlanta, through the interactive fan feature.
“Another thing we have been looking to do will not be there for the start of the season, but hopefully soon after, it would be the marker operator to poll or vote,” Marinak said. “Maybe a team has three or four favorite songs or songs and could send a poll to a team that is actively logging into the feature. In the next five minutes, vote for the song you want to listen to or whatever. The winner You’ll hear it played back on the broadcast. We’re looking at incremental things like that over the course of the season to create fans for additional ways to recreate the experience of a game. “
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