Major League Baseball opened its 2021 season across the U.S. Thursday, with fans in the parks for pretty much the first time in a year.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic put live audiences mostly to a halt last March, there had been no fans at MLB games until some limited-attendance experiments at the end of the season. Over the past year, different sports at different venues had experimented with live fan attendance numbers, mostly greatly reduced to enable social distancing that would help keep the virus in check.
Fast-forward to April 1, 2021, and baseball venues across the nation kicked off the new season with varying levels of fan attendance allowed (most around 20 percent to 30 percent, according to USA Today), depending upon the local restrictions in place. On Monday the Texas Rangers are set to welcome a full house of 43,000+ to Globe Life Field for the Rangers’ home opener.
Stadium Tech Report field scout Lisa Farrell was at the Chicago Cubs’ home opener at Wrigley Field, where 10,343 were inside the Friendly Confines to watch the Cubs lose to the Pirates, 5-3. According to Farrell, some of the new entry procedures venues have been looking at to make attending a game more safe were in place, including new walk-through metal detectors that don’t require fans to take things out of their pockets. All tickets were digital, requiring a download of the MLB Ballpark app, and tickets were self-scanned at kiosks. Fans were given an assigned gate to enter from, and had to stay in a “color zone” once inside the stadium.
Seats inside the stadium were zip-tied to prevent fans from moving around and sitting in places outside their “pod” ticketed areas. For concessions, Wrigley had in place an order-from-your-seat feature in the Ballpark app, which could be used for express pickup or delivery to the seat. Farrell said you could also purchase directly from a concession stand using a credit card — cash was not accepted.
The Extreme Networks-based Wi-Fi network was apparently working well at Wrigley, as attested by Farrell’s speedtest of 27.0 Mbps for download and 24.7 Mbps for upload, in the upper deck reserved seating.
