When the Crowd Didn’t Roar: How Baseball’s Strangest Game Ever Gave a Broken City Hope

The date is April 29, 2015. Baltimore is reeling from the devastating riots sparked by the death in police custody of twenty-five-year-old African American Freddie Gray. Set against this grim backdrop, less than thirty-six hours after the worst rioting Baltimore has seen since the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox take the field at Camden Yards. It is a surreal event they will never forget: the only Major League game until COVID ever played without fans. The eerily quiet stadium is on lockdown for public safety and because police are needed elsewhere to keep the tense city from exploding anew.

When the Crowd Didn’t Roar chronicles this unsettling contest-as well as the tragic events that led up to it and the therapeutic effect the game had on a troubled city. The story comes vividly to life through the eyes of city leaders, activists, police officials, and the media that covered the tumultuous unrest on the streets of Baltimore, as well as the ballplayers, umpires, managers, and front-office personnel of the teams that played in this singular game, and the fans who watched it from behind locked gates. In its own way, amid the uprising and great turmoil, baseball stopped to reflect on the fact that something different was happening in Baltimore and responded to it in an unprecedented way, making this the unlikeliest and strangest game ever played.