Opening Day Beckons For Baseball; Fans Not So Sure

After what fans have felt like a very long time, baseball is getting back to normal on April 1 as opening day officially happens nationwide. There was a baseball season in 2020, of course, but it didn’t officially get off the ground until late June and between the contracted schedule and the empty stadiums, it certainly didn’t feel like America’s past time as we all have come to know and love it.

But this time, it seems fans will be back in the stadiums, at least in Texas, as the Rangers announced they would impose no restrictions on attendance at Globe Life Field, inviting Texans to fill up their second-year ballpark 40,000 strong for their home opener on April 5 against Toronto. The move came a little over a week after Texas Governor Greg Abbott lifted a statewide mask mandate that had been in effect and rolled back most of the executive orders he’d issued since the virus began its spread in March 2020.

Though open for business, the Rangers will require masks to be worn by fans, “except when actively eating and drinking,” a loophole that has been roundly criticized.

“If you make an exception for booze, and everyone is drinking booze, then there’s no mask,” Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association, told USA TODAY Sports in January.

The team announced socially-distanced seating areas would be made available for games after Opening Day when attendance typically wanes, but the vast majority of the stadium will be under no seating restrictions.

The Rangers are unique in the MLB at this point, with most of the other 30 teams working on plans for socially distanced stadium capacity typically in the 20 percent to 30 percent range.

The question, to paraphrase a line from the classic baseball film “Field of Dreams” — if the stadiums offer the capacity, will the fans come? There are reasons to have some doubts there.  In Texas, fans are coming to pre-season exhibition games at the Rangers’ field, but in small numbers. The announced paid attendance of 12,911 was far below the field capacity of nearly 50,000 seats.

But the crowd clearly isn’t a big enough draw to pull more than a fifth of stadium seating capacity in the Lone Star State, leaving a big question mark hanging over the season as it starts up.

According to PYMNTS’s last consumer survey, the problem here isn’t that consumers don’t miss going to the ballpark to catch a game. When asked what they miss most, leisure activities like sporting events and concerts led the list alongside seeing friends and family again and traveling domestically as the things the consumer population is most eager to get back to.

But, the same survey shows that consumers, even in the era of vaccines, are still a bit hesitant to get back out there as 58 percent of consumers would need a COVID-19 vaccine to be in wide circulation and 59 percent report they would need to see a dramatic drop in case numbers before resuming their pre-pandemic habits. And while vaccine rollout is continuing apace in the United States as 22 additional states opened up vaccines to all adults as of this week — that decline in case numbers may or may not be in the offing. Europe is facing a fourth wave of infections and teetering on the edge of instating more lockdowns to slow the diseases spread, and U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials warned a similar wave could be crashing into the U.S. soon as case numbers are beginning to creep up in some states.

Officials have urged states like Texas to reinstate their mask mandates and carry on with social distancing for just a while longer until injection rates can be better controlled. Texas seems unlikely to comply with that request, but it might just be enough to give Texas Ranger fans a moment of pause before heading out to the park to catch a double-header for the first few weeks of the season.

Because come Thursday, the first pitches will go out, but whether fans are quite ready to play ball with physical attendance just yet, remains to be seen.

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