The Orioles game without fans game thread

The word historic is tossed around cavalierly these days, used often enough by people when they really just mean "something cool they just saw" even if it's not necessarily historic. Today at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, though, something historic will occur. The Orioles and White Sox will play a game with zero paid attendance, which has never before happened in the history of Major League Baseball or, as far as I am aware in North American professional sports.

You already know the story. The rioting in Baltimore on Monday has led to two game postponements early in this series and the teams are playing the third game essentially behind closed doors. The press box is full with writers from publications like Slate, Time Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Guardian (though sadly not Camden Chat), but the stands will be empty. No fans, no concessions, just the handful of usual scouts.

The team plans to otherwise have all the usual things going on: The national anthem, the seventh inning stretch, warmup music, and all of that. There just won't be anybody within the stadium environs to cheer about anything, unless you count the teams themselves.

It's going to be weird and it's not going to be normal, which is a fair representation of the city of Baltimore right now. There's nothing normal about the National Guard being deployed on the streets. There's nothing normal about any of this and this curiosity of an Orioles game is just one more sign of that. I hope they win all the same.