The Rangers Play Baseball in Front of a Packed House

There was no need to pipe in crowd noise at Globe Life Field on Monday, as the Texas Rangers hosted the Toronto Blue Jays in front of the largest crowd at a sporting event in the United States in more than a year.

From the long lines of fans waiting to get into the stadium to the persistent buzz of the spectators during quiet moments, the game in Arlington, Texas, was a throwback to a time before the coronavirus crippled the country.

The state’s lifting of capacity restrictions made the enormous crowd possible. And for Major League Baseball, which claims its teams collectively lost billions during a largely fanless 2020 season, it was a hopeful sign that large crowds can return to all of the league’s games before too long. The open question is whether such events can be safe as the pandemic continues.

The Rangers announced in March that the team would sell tickets for every seat of their home opener in a stadium that opened last season. And on Monday that came to fruition, with an official crowd of 38,238 fans. That total, which was announced as a sellout, represented 94.8 percent of the stadium’s 40,300-seat capacity, and it topped the Daytona 500 (which allowed slightly more than 30,000 fans) and the Super Bowl (24,835), both of which were held in February, as the largest crowd at a U.S. sporting event since the pandemic began last year.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/mlb/the-rangers-play-baseball-in-front-of-a-packed-house/ar-BB1fkxyR?li=BBnb7Kz

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