I'll try to keep my interest in you.

I don't want to be alone.

Hello and welcome to episode 1548 of Effectively Wild, a fan-graphed baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Rallye of... I was about to say of the ringer.

Happy Nice.

A fan-graphs. I work for fan-graphs. I know my name and what date is. I'm joined as always by Ben Lindbergh, who does work for the ringer.

Ben, how are you?

I mean, it hasn't been the best week to be a lover of baseball, so we will discuss that shortly and why it hasn't been the best week.

I know that you agree, because we've been chatting about it.

So later in this episode, we are going to have an interview with Eugene Friedman, who is a longtime labor lawyer and a contributor to baseball prospectus, who has been tweeting up a storm about the ongoing MLB negotiations.

So we will ask him to come on and convert his tweet threads into spoken sentences, and that will be fun.

But we have a lot to get to before that. I did just want to follow up on one thing we talked about previously before we talked about the carnage that was this week.

We talked about baseball broadcasts and the idea of pumping in crowd sounds and artificial noise.

And I think we were both sort of skeptical about the idea of essentially pretending that there are fans somewhere when we all know that there aren't fans somewhere.

And morning consult did a poll this week of sports fans and kind of asked them about their thoughts on what they would want broadcast to look like if we get baseball and other sports back.

And I think similar to what we were saying, there are a lot of people who don't like the idea of fake noise, at least in theory.

I don't know whether in practice, we would all like it more than we think. But most people don't like this or more people are against this than for it.

So about 40% of self identified sports fans thought that artificial crowd noise would make the experience of watching live sports from an empty stadium on television less enjoyable by contrast just 16% of fans that they believe the addition of canned cheering would make telecasts more enjoyable.

The good news I guess is that about the same number of people said they would watch the games. So most people are a lot of people said that they think they would enjoy these telecasts less without fans.

But just about as many said that they would still watch which I agree with I will still watch and yes, I might expect it to be a little less enjoyable.

On the whole people are against fake crowd noise and also against the idea of virtual fans in the stands making it look like there are actually fans there.

There's a quote in this article from an ESPN person it says like Fox Sports which has been broadcasting some soccer with fake crowd noise ESPN has also experimented with artificial crowd noise on its telecasts of Korean baseball.

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