The smokey aroma of pulled pork from Boog Powell’s BBQ stand wasn’t wafting over the crowds in downtown Baltimore’s Eutaw Street Wednesday.
But rock music blared from speakers at Camden Yards as the Baltimore Orioles and Chicago White Sox took batting practice in an eerily empty stadium with a capacity of nearly 46,000 rowdy fans.
Like most days, Wednesday’s game opened with the singing of the national anthem. John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” will be played at the seventh-inning stretch.
But the stands were empty. For the first time in Major League Baseball, fans were shut out of a game.
As protests and occasional violent unrest rocked Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, the Orioles took an unprecedented step in American sports history by barring fans for the final game of their series against the White Sox.
“Baseball is filled with the strange, but this is beyond strange,” said Major League Baseball’s official historian, John Thorn.
The move came in the middle of a surreal week in a town nicknamed “Charm City,” the burial place of a master of the bizarre, Edgar Allen Poe, who once said: “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
Wednesday at noon, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra gave a free concert in support of the community outside the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, a short drive from some of the city’s worst looting.
On Monday, as fires were set and protesters clashed with police in East Baltimore, a Michael Jackson impersonator sang “Man In The Mirror” atop a van.
“I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways,” the impersonator, Dimitri Reeves, sang on the roof of the van as protesters and police in riot gear faced off.
“If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and then make a change.”
At 2 p.m. Wednesday at Camden Yards, moments before the first pitch, about 100 or so fans tried to catch the game through gates outside the stadium. The Orioles took the field in the desolate stadium and the national anthem was played on tape. The game was being televised and live-streamed for free by MLB.
The lead-off batter for the White Sox grounded out for the first out of the historic game, a play greeted with silence in the cavernous stadium.