When Did Sports Get So Loud?

On May 26, the New York Mets were doing terrible (generally) and really terrible (acutely). They were at the bottom of their division and down six runs to zero against the Cincinnati Reds, a team whose payroll and—if I may—swag levels were dwarfed by the Mets’. The pitcher for the Mets had recently been booed off the mound by his own fans. Things were, by any objective measure, not going super well at Citi Field. But that night, like every other night this season, the stadium looked, sounded, and felt like a European nightclub on New Year’s Eve: flashing lights; booming music; an in-game announcer taking to a 17,400-square-foot screen and imploring fans to make some noise, with fans happily obliging. If you were a time traveler or even just someone who hadn’t been to a game in a few years, you would have been very, very confused.

I am 38, which means I’m old enough to remember when live baseball was largely devoid of artificial sound. This was when you could hear an entire stadium go silent for a particularly high-stakes at-bat, when big crews of in-game producers did not take any spare moment as a chance to play a pop song or advertise some inscrutable financial-services company, when stadium screens displayed the score and not a series of vaguely baseball-related TikToks. These days, baseball is wall-to-wall stimulation, from before the game starts until well after it ends. A few years ago, about 50 percent of the empty air at the Rogers Centre, where the Toronto Blue Jays play, was occupied by music cues and other sound; now that figure is closer to 95 percent. The Yankees play a sound effect from Star Wars every time the strike count reaches two, and they have since 2021—four years before they allowed their players to have facial hair. Thirty years ago, the walk-up song was a new phenomenon, and it was played only at the beginning of every at-bat; now many stadiums pipe in music between every pitch.