For Benjamin Hesse, a 33-year-old lifelong Mets fan who gets to Citi Field about 40 times each season, the beauty of attending a baseball game has always been its natural ambience—a soundtrack of peanut sales, bat cracks, and the low hum of pleasant chatter.
But lately, Hesse says, “they’re just blasting this music. I find it to be incredibly overwhelming.”
Between nearly every pitch, speakers erupt into cacophonous music, sound effects, and participatory prompts that ricochet around the ballpark and effectively consume his conversations. It’s not just his perception. MLB teams are increasingly introducing louder walk-up music, more audio cues, bigger video-board and light activations, and constant prompts demanding fans “MAKE SOME NOISE.”
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, baseball has experienced a genuine resurgence, fueled by rule changes to speed up games, new international superstars, and dramatic postseason and World Baseball Classic moments. And now, with that crop of new and younger fans, many of whom are accustomed to second-screen styles of entertainment, more teams are raising the volume to keep eyeballs glued to the action and get fans in seats.
“It’s always on my mind,” Chris DeRuyscher, VP of ballpark entertainment for the Texas Rangers, tells Front Office Sports. “There’s a new generation out there, and there has been for a while. And baseball is slowly but surely catching up to it.”
